The Flash Turned Out a Complete Disaster in Ratings and Returns, Here's Why
With the massive overhype for The Flash before its release, we were curious to see what results it would yield… And let's just say our predictions were about right.
Recently, we wrote that as time went on, The Flash was appearing to be less of a movie and more of an unreasonably expensive experiment trying to answer a question, "How overpraised can an unreleased movie become until it's no longer funny?" — and at this point, it seems that for its creators, the fun has ended.
The Flash has just gone through its first weekend, and so far, the results are really underwhelming for what was consistently referred to as "the best comic book movie to have ever comic book movied."
Neither the box office returns nor the ratings and reviews exactly support that statement, and the overall situation is rather grim. In terms of ratings, The Flash's Rotten Tomatoes score reveals all you need to know.
With a whopping 95% audience score prior to the release (which we can't be sure why it's even a thing), after the first weekend, it dropped 10% with the movie now sitting at 85%.
This is largely complemented by the 66% critics score which is even more underwhelming after the neverending praise coming from various big-name stars for weeks before The Flash hit the theaters.
We'll see if the downhill trend continues after the first weekend, but so far, it's not great for The Flash.
Especially considering the box office revenues: by this time, Andy Muschietti's latest entry has managed to collect just $55M domestically which is a disaster for a movie that had a production budget of $200M and a marketing budget of over $100M.
Even the most pessimistic projections promised The Flash at least a $100M opening.
This type of superhero movie is supposed to be a weekend-smasher that profits off the first few days in the cinemas; The Flash, however, only made a fraction of its cost back.
While we wait for the global numbers, we can't be sure about the real scale of the tragedy, but the US audience obviously didn't quite fall for the marketing strat.
For some people, this situation raises logical questions — for instance, "How could a movie so praised and well-marketed fall so flat?" — and the only answer we can give is that maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't spend over a third of your budget on marketing and gathering positive hypeviews from the industry's titans.
It's almost like focusing on the movie itself should be a priority… Nah, scratch that. That can't be right.
Source: Rotten Tomatoes