Posted in: Flash, Movies, TV, Warner Bros | Tagged: andy muschietti, The Flash

Andy Muschietti On Why He Believes The Flash Failed At The Box Office

Andy Muschietti says The Flash failed because people weren't interested in Barry Allen as a character. The TV show ran for 9 seasons and 184 episodes.

In 2023, the first version of the DC Cinematic Universe spectacularly crashed and burned, and despite having four tries to get it right, only one of the movies was good, and that one movie didn't make any money at the box office (justice for Blue Beetle). A lot of them were pretty specular failures, but nothing was as big as The Flash. That movie was announced in the first round of films when the DC Universe was coming to be, and it just kept getting delayed. It went through multiple directors, screenplays, ideas, and false starts; it was about as messy a production as possible. It would be an expensive movie no matter what, but people don't always realize that all those false starts aren't free. Pre-production costs money regardless of whether or not you're making any progress, so whatever the budget Warner Bros. admitted The Flash was, it was probably much higher.

The film "mostly" premiered at CinemaCon to people liking it [for some reason I will never understand; I was baffled at that convention, and I remain baffled to this day], but it was revealed that the movie was "unfinished" only for a final reveal that somehow made a bad film worse. The rest of the world saw the movie for what it was, and the box office reflected that with the film being declared as one of the biggest movie bombs we've seen in the last decade or so. Ever since then, the post-mortem on The Flash has been interesting, to say the least, with Sasha Calle recalling how hard the press tour was since she needed to get pushed to the front because of Ezra Miller's issues to Nicolas Cage saying what he did on set is not what ended up on screen. Director Andy Muschietti recently made headlines when he spoke about The Brave and the Bold getting postponed, but that turned out to be a miscommunication or something, and now he's gone on the record for why he believes The Flash failed to Radio TU (via CinemaBlend). Please note that this is translated from Portuguese, and this wouldn't be the first time some nuance was lost in translation, so keep that in mind.

"The Flash failed, among all the other reasons (Ezra Miller, superhero fatigue), because it wasn't a movie that appealed to all four quadrants. It failed at that. When you spend $200 million making a movie, Warner wants to bring even your grandmother to the theaters. And I've found in private conversations that a lot of people just don't care about The Flash as a character. Particularly the two female quadrants. All of that is just the wind going against the film I've learned."

There are a lot of things to say to that statement, but trying to say that The Flash doesn't appeal to women specifically is utterly baffling because DC practically lived on the CW. This channel was very female-focused for a very long time. The reason why The Flash and other shows in the Arrowverse were around as long as they were was because of the extremely dedicated female fanbases that sprung up around those shows. So, saying women aren't interested in The Flash as a character is categorically wrong to the tune of the 184 episodes over nine years. So plenty of people care about Bally Allen as a character; they didn't care about this Barry Allen because no one ever had a reason to. This was the gamble that DC and Warner Bros. took when they decided to have two different actors running around and playing the same character. While The Flash movie spent years in development hell, an entire generation of fans fell in love with Grant Gustin as Barry, and they didn't want to see anyone else as the character. They didn't see a point in another Barry turning up.

Many things went wrong with The Flash, but Muschietti blaming audience interest isn't the right place to point fingers. There is interest in this character; the CW wouldn't have kept renewing the show if there wasn't; there just wasn't interest in this movie because of the baggage attached when your production is carrying the wait of nearly a decade of production delays, half a dozen directors, multiple page-one rewrites, and a lead actor whose personal issues are impossible to escape, that will impact things. Even more so in an era when all the layman needs to do is open up X/Twitter, and they'll see everyone writing about these things all over their timelines.

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