What Will The Flash Make on its Opening Weekend? And Over its Longer Run? (A Box Office Prediction)

Seeing the way the buzz for The Flash turned so positive--the way the media has got behind the movie--I wondered whether the audience was actually responsive, and looked forward to Boxoffice Pro's long-range forecast accordingly.

Out today, it predicts an opening weekend in the $115-$140 million range for The Flash, on the way to the film eventually taking in $280-$375 million domestically. In short, there are expectations that--domestically at least--the film will do at least as well as Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and perhaps considerably better, especially over its fuller run. (Yesterday I predicted here that even fairly strong week-to-week holds from here on out would get Guardians 3 to just $330 million or so, about the middle of the range predicted for The Flash.)

What would that imply for the global gross? The bigger pre-pandemic DCEU movies (namely Man of Steel, Superman vs. Batman, Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, Justice League and Aquaman--all better analogies with The Flash today than smaller productions like Shazam and the pandemic release The Suicide Squad, especially as the box office continues to normalize and the biggest movies are as strong a draw as ever they were), made from 50 to 70 percent of their money internationally.

Between Boxoffice Pro's domestic range, and that figure, we get a very wide range for the possible global gross of from $550 million to almost $1.3 billion.

Of course, until recently the predictions I saw hewed closer to the bottom end of that range than the top--circa $700 million, which would not be far off the mark were the movie to do reasonably well in North America and simply match that abroad (e.g. take in a near-top-of-the-Boxoffice Pro-range $350 million, and make the same overseas; or do a bottom-of-the-range $280 million but make one-and-a-half times that internationally). Still, in the past DCEU movies have, if often seen as disappointments relative to the "Marvel envy" expectations laid on them, still done better than that in real, inflation-adjusted terms. In fact, even in current dollars only two of the six first-rank DCEU movies failed to break the $700 million mark, while all of them blew past it by a considerable way in real terms. Even the lowest earner here, Justice League, grossed almost $800 million when we adjust the dollar values of their year's release to April 2023 dollars, while in the same terms not one but three of the movies broke the billion-dollar barrier (alongside Aquaman, Superman vs. Batman and Wonder Woman doing so), as another came pretty close (Suicide Squad, with its $940 million+ gross back in 2016).

Selected DCEU Films, 2013-2018 (Current and Consumer Price Index-Adjusted April 2023 U.S. Dollars, Adjusted Figures in Parentheses)*

Man of Steel (2013)--Worldwide--$668 Million ($869 Million); Domestic--$291 Million ($378 Million)

Superman vs. Batman: Dawn of Justice (2016)--Worldwide--$871 Million ($1.1 Billion); Domestic--$330 Million ($416 Million)

Suicide Squad (2016)--Worldwide--$747 Million ($943 Million); Domestic--$325 Million ($410 Million)

Wonder Woman (2017)--Worldwide--$822 Million ($1.02 Billion); Domestic--$413 Million ($510 Million)

Justice League (2017)--Worldwide--$658 Million ($794 Million); Domestic--$229 Million ($276 Million)

Aquaman (2018)--Worldwide--$1.15 Billion ($1.39 Billion); Domestic--$335 Million ($404 Million)

Might The Flash then not do better--perhaps much better?--than $700 million. Alas, the DCEU universe is not just in decline, but on its way out, so that there is no build-up toward anything bigger and better such as likely helped some of the earlier films. It may also suffer the effects of bad press about the star, while facing a lot of summer competition.

I might add that good as its press is lately it falls short of the kind of cheer-leading I remember for Wonder Woman back in 2017.

All of this gives it more obstacles to overcome than the preceding films had, less with which to overcome them, and less to gain if it does accomplish the feat (such that even if a pleasantly surprised audience supplies good word-of-mouth it may only count for so much).

So let us let us play it safe and focus on the middle of the relevant ranges with regard to The Flash's domestic gross, and that gross' share of the global total--about $330 million domestic, with somewhere around 60 percent of the revenue foreign, working out to a global gross the vicinity of $800-$850 million. Recognizing $550 million as the absolute rock bottom, and allowing some room for error at the high end (rounding up from 8.5 to 9), $900 million would seem a reasonable high end to the range--so that $600-$900 million is the broader range I have in mind for the time being, with $700-$850 million the more plausible range within that, the movie breaking the billion-dollar barrier still a long shot.

All the same, I do not doubt I will have more to say about this in the coming weeks as more information comes in--with, in fact, one angle on a possible long shot already germinating into its own post as I write this.

* I took the film's gross and adjusted from the prices of the film's year of release (e.g. 2013) to the prices of April 2023 (the latest now available).