I hate to see DC fail, but sometimes an end product just doesn’t meet the standards of the industry, the genre, or the fans. Unfortunately, The Flash met none of them. After marketing, the budget of The Flash is estimated to be at about 375 million dollars and it only made 271 million dollars in theaters, meaning it came up about one hundred million dollars short. Of course, that doesn’t account for toys sold, streaming revenue, and so on, but it also doesn’t account for the costs. All things considered and without a doubt, The Flash massively bombed.
Recently, Andy Muschietti spoke candidly about The Flash’s failure, something it most certainly was. He spoke about the reasons for the movie’s failure, saying the following:
“It’s the result of a mental health situation, you know. It turned out the way it turned out, let’s say. I mean, they were dealing with a mental health situation, and well, when you make a movie, there are things you just can’t control. One of them is when actors have a public relations crisis. You know, they got into trouble, was arrested in Hawaii, etc., etc. I had, in general, a very good experience with them. They’re a great actor, a great comedian. I was very surprised by them. But then, towards the end, I came across all of this.
I’d say this happened months before the release, just before the premiere, and well, it was a setback. Later, other factors piled up, like, you know, the fatigue with the superhero genre. Years later, I started learning about other things, like how when a movie like this is made, there’s an expectation to appeal to all four quadrants of the audience. And this is a movie that, apart from everything else I mentioned, I think failed in the sense that it didn’t appeal to all four quadrants of the audience.
When a $200 million movie is made, the studio expects to bring everyone, even your grandmother, to the theater. And in private conversations later on, I learned things like how a lot of people weren’t interested in the Flash as a character. Half of those four quadrants — the two female quadrants — many women didn’t care about Flash as a character. These are things that worked against the movie, and I gradually found out about them. But I’m very happy with the movie, and I highly recommend it.”
Some parts of this make sense and definitely play into the movie’s failure. Ezra Miller certainly had a lot going on. If you want to bring yourself up to speed on all the allegations brought up against them, feel free to do some Googling, but it involved allegations of kidnapping, inappropriate behavior towards a minor, and several actual criminal charges. Yes, that most certainly played into it.
Superhero fatigue is a lame excuse. Very simply put, superhero movies do good when they are good movies. Deadpool & Wolverine broke a billion dollars at the box office this year and it’s rated R. Say what you will about the plot of the movie if you analyze it too hard, but it’s certainly a good movie. Joker: Folie á Deux was not a good movie (complex doesn’t mean good), therefore, it made almost no money.
Muschietti’s comments about people not being interested in Flash as a character, particularly women, are categorically false. Behind Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, the Flash is, arguably, DC’s fourth most popular character. This is also a poor excuse. Before Guardians of the Galaxy, very few people knew who they were and that movie blew up their popularity because people liked it. The Flash is a much more popular character, and there was clearly an audience for him. On top of this, the idea of having a 200 million dollar movie appeal to every single type of audience member is absurd. The Batman’s budget was 185 million and that certainly didn’t appeal to everyone’s grandma. Maybe that’s why it didn’t hit a billion, but a movie doesn’t need that to be successful.
The first, and most obvious reason The Flash truly failed, is the absolutely awful CGI. Very close to the movie’s release, within a few days, Muschietti went on record to say that all the CGI was intentional and completely done. Even then, I didn’t buy it. Since then, alleged workers for the VFX companies that worked on the movie said they were rushed. The CGI, in some scenes, was truly terrible. The notorious falling baby scene will most certainly go down in infamy as one of the worst scenes in superhero movie history. Word of mouth spread very quickly about the poor CGI likely convincing many moviegoers to not go.
The second reason The Flash failed must be the ongoing collapse of the DCEU. The Flash went through a massive amount of rewrites and regime changes. At one point, it was set to reboot the DCEU into a version that had Keaton’s Batman leading the Justice League. When it all went downhill and it seemed fairly clear Gunn was going to reboot everything, many people assumed the movie would not matter in terms of the universe it was connected to, and they assumed correctly. The Flash was the second to last movie in a dead franchise, something that put many people off.
The third reason for The Flash’s failure would be the writing. To be fair, the writing wasn’t all bad. There were some scenes that were great like Batman fighting the goons in the tunnel, but if you analyzed the plot of the movie for more than a few minutes, you’d find a story about a boy who wants to save his mom layered in nonsensical complexity. For example, the weird time bubble thing. Why in the world would they choose to portray time travel in such a way, I have no idea. In the category of writing, is the cameos which were mostly shoehorned in for no reason. Not one cameo in the multiverse bubble thing had an actual reason for being there. At least in Deadpool & Wolverine and Spider-Man: No Way Home the cameos were there to continue the stories of the characters themselves.
Superhero fatigue and all the lack of interest in the Flash as a character are terrible excuses. Ezra Miller’s controversies definitely played into it, but Muschietti has failed to recognize that the movie had terrible CGI, the DCEU’s collapse hurt his film, and that the writing wasn’t great.
Let me know what you think in the comments!