The Flash's Rotten Tomatoes Scores

In a year in which big-budget franchise action films kept crashing and burning the flopping of The Flash still stands out as an extreme case. The movie made a mere $108 million in its entire North American run (when for such a highly anticipated movie $108 million would have been regarded as a disappointing opening weekend), and not much more overseas--a mere $160 million that left it with just under $269 million in total. Especially given the film's hefty price tag--which in yet another revelation of a major film's budget being considerably larger than was originally announced, seems to have been in the $300 million range--the loss to the studio may end up in the range of several hundred million.

Interestingly, this was in spite of the film apparently not being hated. The critics' score was 63 percent, the audience score 83 percent--not spectacular, but other films with much, much worse have done much, much better, and there is room to think that the scores would have been higher had it not been for the unhinged overhyping of the movie as the greatest superhero film ever made at a moment when the standard is extremely high, the audience showing signs of becoming jaded. (Indeed, I think there is still room for the movie, given its oddities, to become a cult success.)

All of that seems to underline just how much the film market may be changing--and, much as they are evidently resisting it, forcing change on the Hollywood system of a kind not seen in a half century.