Andy Muschietti Gets in his Two Cents on The Flash's Failure

Apparently the press is still talking about the colossal failure of Andy Muschietti's DC superhero film The Flash.

The director of the movie, explaining the matter in Hollywood insider terms in a story from Variety, talked about The Flash not being the "four quadrant movie" that supposedly any movie financed at that level has to be in order to turn a profit.

Getting a little more substantive than this tossing about of buzzwords he remarked "that a lot of people just don’t care about the Flash as a character."

Of course, anyone could have told Mr. Muschietti that--and indeed, before the breathless hyping of the movie as "the greatest superhero movie ever made" completely confused things back in the spring of 2023 the more astute box office analysts had less buoyant expectations for the film than they would have for, for example, a Batman or Superman film. (Thus did the comparatively optimistic folks at Screen Rant who thought Ant-Man 3 would be a billion-dollar hit, Guardians of the Galaxy do better and The Marvels fall just short of a billion expected just $700 million for The Flash.)

However, this mattered the more for a host of reasons Mr. Muschietti did not raise. Yes, there is the "Ezra Miller problem," and yes, there is the way the "greatest superhero movie ever made" hype probably backfired, but there are also the more structural matters--not least the audience's longtime lukewarmness toward the DC Extended Universe, all as The Flash had the misfortune of hitting theaters in a much tighter market than before (again, moviegoing down by a third relative to the pre-pandemic period) in which even more promising material was underperforming badly (as those three Marvel Cinematic Universe films did relative to the expectations for them), with the reality of superhero fatigue not helping.

Of course, just as Mr. Muschietti did not raise these aspects of the issue, neither did the writers at Variety, nor those other media outlets retailing the remarks--who as courtiers to the industry's kings cannot be expected to be very attentive to these inconvenient facts.