The Flash Was About to Set a New DCEU Record, Couldn't Pull That Off
The Flash almost became the DCEU’s worst movie in terms of opening box office revenue, but even that type of record proved to be too good for the film, somehow.
The entire story of The Flash ’s development is a massive pain considering how many struggles and leadership changes the movie had to endure in order to finally get released. After all these years, it’s a miracle that Andy Muschietti managed to get his project done at all… But not the kind of miracle that pays off too well, it seems.
While lack of marketing can kill the best movies, The Flash chose a different path and allocated over one-third of its overall budget to marketing, hooking up the industry’s A-listers to sing the song of praise to the film and positioning it as “the greatest comic book adaptation in the history” or something along those lines.
The issue is, this kind of marketing praise set the bar of expectations very high, and in the end, it became unreachable for The Flash. Both critics and the general audience went to see the best superhero movie ever, and what they received was unforgivably poor-quality CGI, a stone-faced lead actor, and a non-consensual cameo.
It’s no wonder that The Flash’s opening weekend turned out to be one of the worst in DCEU history. It probably could’ve become the worst of all time, but somehow, the movie was all too mediocre: it couldn’t even become the most disastrous DC flop so it landed rather uncomfortably in the bottom half of the rating.
On its opening weekend, The Flash only collected $55.7M against the budget of $220M for production and over $100M for marketing. Just to break even on production, the movie needs around $440M — and if you take the insane marketing costs into consideration, even half a mil wouldn’t save it from being a loss-maker.
Of all the DC movies ever, apart from those launched during the pandemic, only three films — Shazam!, Birds of Prey, and Shazam! Fury of the Gods — earned less in their opening weekend than The Flash. Shazam! went on to collect $366M worldwide later, though, but the reviews for Andy Muschietti’s movie are nowhere near as good, so there’s little hope that The Flash will even match those numbers.
Seems like there’s no record-breaking in store for this movie — neither positive nor negative.