The Flash in many ways was an appropriate end to the DC Extended Universe. Yes, the film also included a post-credits scene which set up the obligatory and already forgotten Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, but that underwater superhero movie arrived in theaters like a sunken afterthought. Meanwhile The Flash, directed with a lot of pep and energy by filmmaker Andy Muschietti, came roaring out and swinging for the fences.
With a galaxy-brained premise that spent close to a decade in production, The Flash saw Ezra Miller’s super-speedster cause the entire DC universe to implode after he went back in time to prevent the murder of his mom. In the end, a major reason the film finally got off the ground is that the powers-that-be at the time saw The Flash as a fresh start. It would be the movie that allowed Warner Bros. Pictures to fix the real and substantial flaws in the previous DCEU installments by hitting an in-canon “reset button” that would replace Ben Affleck’s Batman with Michael Keaton and introduce Sasha Calle as a an underrated Supergirl. It also would service fans with cameos by Affleck, Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, Michael Shannon as Krypton’s dastardly General Zod, and even Nicolas Cage as a long-haired Superman fighting a giant spider, an easter egg that only the most dedicated Kal-El fans (and/or Kevin Smith diehards) would get.
It’s safe to say The Flash screenplay attempted to do a lot. Too much. And like the DCEU as a whole, it proved to be in a huge hurry getting nowhere. Even though the then newly installed Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav trumpeted the movie as “the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen,” audiences by and large disagreed. At least those who showed up.
After the movie received a mixed 63 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, The Flash opened to a disastrous $55 million in the U.S. and would go on to earn only $271 million globally. It’s a bleak figure when compared to the film’s reported $200 million budget (and the number is probably larger, even before marketing and publicity costs are tallied in). So despite being intended to set up grand new things for the DCEU, The Flash traveled super-fast down a road to nowhere.
Looking back on the film’s reception, director Muschietti has a theory about why it didn’t work. Speaking with Radio Tu’s La Baulera del Coso show, and as translated by Variety, Muschietti said, “The Flash failed, among all the other reasons, because it wasn’t a movie that appealed to all four quadrants. It failed at that. When you spend $200 million making a movie, [Warner Bros.] wants to bring even your grandmother to the theaters.” The director went on to add that people generally don’t seem to care about the Flash character, especially women.
“I’ve found in private conversations that a lot of people just don’t care about the Flash as a character,” Muschietti said. “Particularly the two female quadrants. All of that is just the wind going against the film I’ve learned.”
Muschietti is not entirely wrong (though close). It is fair to say that while comic book fans might adore DC Comics’ fastest man alive, he does not enjoy the same widespread popularity of Batman and Superman, or Spider-Man and the X-Men across the street. However, there was also a time not that long ago where the same could be said about Iron Man. Or Captain America. Or the Guardians of the Galaxy and their talking raccoon. Yet all of them became the faces of multi-billion dollar franchises with four-quadrant appeal, and none of those characters had a hit TV series on the female-skewing CW network…
So why didn’t the same thing happen for the Flash? While this is ultimately just an educated guess, we have some ideas.
A Falling Star
It is difficult to diagnose how much bad PR or social media chatter influences the average moviegoer’s perception of a superhero movie. As recent history has shown, audiences are only too happy to show up for a new superhero movie starring an actor they have never heard of but then fail to return after that same performer becomes “a star.” As future Captain America Anthony Mackie succinctly put it, “Anthony Mackie isn’t a movie star. Falcon is a movie star.”
Be that as it may, the marketing push of all major Hollywood movies these days still need to pivot around a real face and personality, even if it’s just “the guy who plays Falcon.” Or the Flash for that matter. Someone who can do the interview junkets, the late night television rounds, and show up on younger skewing online programs that run the gamut from Celebs Play with Puppies to Hot Ones. It may not make them a star, but it makes them a face that reminds audiences that a big movie is coming, and they should theoretically be excited about it.
Yet when it came to The Flash that proved frustratingly impossible. Or at least implausible considering the allegations and legal entanglements the Flash actor Miller found themselves in by 2023. Whether general audiences were fully aware of Miller’s troubles or struggle with mental health is difficult to say, but the fact of the matter is WB wisely decided The Flash’s biggest lead should not promote the film, and its second biggest lead, Michael Keaton, chose not to. Newcomer Sasha Calle gave it an impressive college try, but she played a character audiences were unsure about—a Supergirl from a different universe who may not appear in another DC film—and didn’t have the resume of working in previous DC films.
In other words, Miller’s absence created a black hole in the marketing campaign around The Flash that nobody was able to fill. That is a pretty major problem right there, but it’s not the biggest…
WB Already Signaled This Was the End of the Line
In January 2023, new DC Studios co-head James Gunn boldly announced the first slate of what he dubbed the new DC Universe. There would be a new Superman movie with a new actor and timeline, then tentatively titled Superman: Legacy; there would be TV shows in live-action and animation; there would even be a new Batman unrelated to either Ben Affleck’s character in the DCEU or the one played by Robert Pattinson in The Batman; and there would be a new Supergirl movie called Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow.
When asked whether Calle might play that Supergirl, Gunn at the time was vague and perhaps evasive. It left room for fan speculation, as well as intense skepticism. And that was in regard to The Flash’s biggest new addition to the DC Extended Universe. Meanwhile it was already confirmed by then that Henry Cavill was done as Superman, Gal Gadot seemed unlikely to play Wonder Woman again as she seemingly said goodbye to the character on social media, and Affleck had spent the past half-decade with one foot out the door.
The entire lineup of the DCEU’s once glistening Justice League was going, going, gone, and whatever promises The Flash made about the next era of the onscreen DC universe seemed illusory at best. And so they were. House of the Dragon’s Milly Alcock is now Supergirl, Gunn and Muschietti are both allegedly creating a new Batman for The Brave and the Bold, and David Corenswet’s Superman presumably hails from a far sunnier Krypton than the bleak hellscape Michael Shannon represented in The Flash.
Like Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Aquaman 2, and the rest of the 2023 DC slate, The Flash arrived two years ago as a lame duck, a new phenomenon in cinema created by the industrial scale at which superhero flicks are now churned out. Admittedly, a movie should be enjoyable unto itself as a complete experience. And whatever else you might think of The Flash, we do concede it is a self-contained story with a beginning, middle, and end. However, it is also a piece of a studio’s grander marketing strategy, and for the last 20 years Marvel, Disney, and sure enough the DCEU have trained media-savvy fans to anticipate each film as a pseudo-commercial for the next two or three in the pipeline.
The brilliance (or cynicism) of Marvel’s success is that each product acts as a commercial for the next one, and the fans cheer all the louder when they can piece together what the advertisement means like a child deciphering their Little Orphan Annie Decoder Ring. But when you publicly and forcefully announce the next four films will be advertising things that will never come—like Calle as Supergirl or a world where Miller’s Flash will have a key role opposite… George Clooney(?!)—it turns into the equivalent of false advertising.
And no one wants that.
… And Then There’s the Rest of the DCEU
Of course there is a reason WB brought in James Gunn and Peter Safran to ultimately reboot and remake the DC Universe in their own image: the DCEU brand had become hopelessly toxic even before Gunn publicly pulled the plug.
While fandom worlds were rocked about a decade earlier when Zack Snyder announced that Batman would appear in the sequel to Man of Steel, which in turn would lead into Justice League, the castle he promised turned out to be made of sand. Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has its share of vociferous defenders, but the film was generally received poorly by the mainstream moviegoers. Forget about the ghastly reviews which did not prevent BvS from earning $874 million in 2023. Consider instead the massive drop off between that film and the following year’s Justice League, which despite being “the big one” opened to about $94 million (down 44 percent from BvS’ debut) and wound up grossing only $661 million worldwide. That’s a far cry from Avengers’ billion-dollar expectations.
The DCEU had critical and financial successes outside of that trajectory, too. Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman was both in 2017. However, the studio rarely was able to capitalize on them, with Wonder Woman 1984 being the divisively received sequel released during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile some of the best DCEU films, like James Gunn’s underrated The Suicide Squad (2021), failed due to being associated with the widely disliked 2016 movie with almost the exact same title.
Before The Flash and the other DCEU movies of 2023 were abandoned, the previous three theatrically released DCEU movies (not counting WW84) either underperformed or outright flopped, including 2022’s much maligned Black Adam, which was unsuccessfully marketed by its star Dwayne Johnson around the idea that “the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe is changed.”
Ultimately, audiences came to the conclusion long before WB that the DCEU brand was unsustainable, and viewed new trailers not with the excitement of the Marvel Studios joint in the 2010s, but with the kind of derision and incredulity that was greeting late-era Fox X-Men movies (think Dark Phoenix and New Mutants). The DCEU’s brand perception was in free-fall by the time The Flash came along, and this was not the movie to turn things around.
Superhero Fatigue
Still, at the end of the day, The Flash did not die alone. In fact, 2023 marked not only the end of the DCEU but the first year where Marvel Studios experienced its first unmitigated flop. The Disney studio had seen underperformers before, including the then-recent Eternals (2021). They also experienced another at the beginning of the year when Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania underperformed even more glaringly during a period of bad press for the studio.
All that turned out to be small potatoes when compared to The Marvels earning a bleak $206 million worldwide, and less than $85 million in the U.S. For context, the first Captain Marvel grossed nearly double that latter figure in its opening weekend.
Audiences increasingly show a higher degree of burnout and weariness when it comes to the superhero genre. But that might just be another way of saying they’re better at parsing out capestuff that is of dubious quality. Now mediocre superhero movies will not become runaway box office hits by virtue of their genre and/or “universe.” The Flash was just one casualty in a growing battlefield’s worth of bland, fallen superhero fodder.
Luckily, does not mean the genre is dead or the future dimmed. Last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine grossed nearly $1.4 billion by itself. That movie also, for whatever its flaws, delivered exactly what it promised: a fun time with Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, and enough palpable nostalgia and sentimentality to make you feel wistful about Jennifer Garner’s Elektra… a character we promise you did not cross your mind once in the past 20 years.
Superhero movie fatigue is real. But a movie that delivers what’s on the box can still beat it. Unfortunately, The Flash didn’t deliver for much of anyone.
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