The Flash came out in 2023, one of the final films in what was then the DC Cinematic Universe before executives at Warner Bros. Discovery decided to scrap the whole thing and try again with James Gunn at the helm. Reviews were decent but not great. The movie didn't exactly crater at the box office, making $266 million on a $200 million budget. But if you go by the rule of thumb that a movie needs to make back double its budget to be profitable, that's still a failure.
Speaking on Radio TU's "La Baulera del Coso" show , The Flash director Andy Muschietti offered up some reasons why he thinks the movie failed to set the world on fire. “‘The Flash’ failed, among all the other reasons, because it wasn’t a movie that appealed to all four quadrants. It failed at that,” he said. “When you spend $200 million making a movie, [Warner Bros.] wants to bring even your grandmother to the theaters.”
The four quadrants, if you're wondering, are men under 25, women under 25, men over 25, and women over 25. Muschietti also opined that people just may not have been that into The Flash. “I’ve found in private conversations that a lot of people just don’t care about the Flash as a character,” he said. “Particularly the two female quadrants. All of that is just the wind going against the film I’ve learned.”
I doubt I'm alone in rolling my eyes at both of these reasons. The Flash may not be as big a character as Superman or Batman, but the idea that this hurt the box office is very silly, because there are approximatey one million counter-examples. Even if you just stay in the old DCU, Aquaman is arguably even less popular than The Flash, and his first movie made over a billion dollars at the box office. Shazam is definitely less well known, and his first movie made way more than The Flash. And if you look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe, movies about little-known characters like Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel, and the Guardians of the Galaxy all made a ton of money. So come on, Andy. COME ON.
Notably, the second movies from the old DCU to revolve around Aquaman and Shazam made far less than the first. Those movies came out around the same time as The Flash. At this point, the whole of the DCU had lost momentum; there's no need to blame it on the Flash specifically. Oh, and did we forget that there was a Flash TV show that ran for nine seasons? nO oNe LIkeS tHe CHaRacTeR.
As for appealing to the four quadrants, three of the most successful movies of 2024 were Inside Out 2, Moana 2 and Despicable Me 4, none of which were trying to rope in older viewers. Also, let's not forget that The Flash movie had a famously difficult production that included many delays, not to mention the fact that star Ezra Miller went on a cross-country crime spree during the lead-up to release.
So there are a lot of reasons The Flash came up short; Muschietti blaming it on the movie's failure to hit marketing benchmarks, or worse, claiming that the character isn't popular, feels like an extreme case of cope.
The first movie in the new DC Cinematic Universe will be Superman, which comes out on on July 11 of this year. If that gets the ball rolling, I doubt Warner Bros. will have any problems getting people to pay money to see a Flash movie. As for Muschietti, he's producing a new TV show spun off from his IT movies:
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h/t Variety