Matt Meyer
The long-delayed, long-awaited Flash movie debuted Friday, but per Variety, has skidded to a depressingly-low $55 million domestic opening weekend, dashing any hopes that maybe, maybe, the endlessly-convoluted saga of the DCEU might be turning a corner toward the positive as it lurches toward the James Gunn era. The film pulled in $75m internationally, but in an era where franchises live or die on tentpole success being measured in the billions, that’s hardly reassuring that the film “just needs to gain momentum.”
What went wrong? What went right? We think we know. WARNING: HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD!
The DCEU Curse
It’s not much of a secret that the DCEU has been plagued with misfires and backroom drama from the very start. When first announced in 2013, Warner’s super-ambitious (some might say unrealistic) schedule had The Flash debuting in 2018, long before the studio even had a script, a director, or a leading man. Multiple directors and screenwriters came and went, and the movie wound up in a state of being perpetually delayed in pre-production hell. The result of all that was the movie debuting a whole five years after its originally-intended release date; but by the time of its release, the absolute disaster that was the original DCEU plan was so far in the past, it might as well have not existed at all.
The original DCEU plan from 2013 was as bloated as it was wrong-headed.
Eventually, the studio hired Andy Muschietti, whose only previous major films of note were the divisive adaptations of Stephen King’s It. Despite some fan backlash on changes made to the original novel, though, those films were hits (the first more than the second), and surely someone at WB wanted to tap into that MCU skill of elevating indie-level directors to the bigs with Muschietti.
To be clear – Muschietti is a fine director. There are plenty of perfectly serviceable cinematic moments throughout The Flash to attest to that. But was he the right director for a tentpole superhero romp through the timestream that – fairly or not – wound up bearing the weight of an entire franchise, past and future? Muschietti’s best moments in both It movies came from the smaller, intimate moments where characters were allowed room to breathe, be vulnerable, and emote. The same holds true with The Flash, but given the nature of the film, there are precious few of these scenes to work with whatsoever. The majority of the story is superhero-driven big screen drama that plays around with space/time, the multiverse, alternate versions of the hero, and so much more. A small, intimate drama it ain’t.
Credit where credit’s due – Muschietti was hired to do a job, to helm a film, and he did the best he could with what he had to work with. Yes, the CGI is abysmal in places, looking more like a 2003 Xbox 360 game cut scene than a 2023 movie, and yes, there are some major pacing problems. But iIf Flash had been a smaller-scale, more personal-scale drama about Barry Allen struggling to come to grips with the death of his mother, Muschietti might have been exactly the director this film needed. Instead, his strengths got lost in the morass of the past failures and future hopes for the DCEU, and as a result, the film suffered for it. It would be unfair to blame all of this on Muschietti, especially with how public the flaming dumpster fire that is Warner Brothers’ upper management has metastasized into. At this point, it’s more than a little shocking that any movies are getting made there.
The Script Tries to Do Too Much
With superhero films, the temptation is always to go big, especially after the MCU successfully demonstrated the proper way to continuously level up in phases one through three of its cinematic juggernaut. But for the Thanos of it all, it’s important to remember that it started with just Tony Stark in a suit of armor cobbled together in a cave.
Those modest beginnings gave the MCU a firm, character-driven foundation. It only spread upwards and outwards after it had that foundation in place, and took over a decade to reach its Endgame, which was, in terms of scope, arguably the biggest film in terms of scope the studio had yet to produce.
With the DCEU, though, Warner Brothers failed to learn that lesson, and wanted to start big with the Justice League without having properly given viewers reason to care about its individual members first. That meant that fans were given a Barry Allen they knew nothing about other than Ezra Miller’s bizarre affect for the character (is he supposed to sound stereotypically autistic?) and that he runs really fast and that he’s still a neophyte hero. He clearly doesn’t know how actual human beings run. By the time we catch up to Barry in The Flash, the film now has to work double time to backtrack in fleshing out the sorta-touched on origin from Justice League and ramp it up to create now-relevant stakes; explain the multiverse and the hazards of time travel; shoehorn in a second Barry Allen; establish that he’s really into Iris West just enough to remind viewers she exists; tie it all into shenanigans from the now-decade-old Man of Steel, and introduce Supergirl and re-introduce fans to Michael’s Keaton’s Batman while also setting up James Gunn and Peter Safran’s revised DCEU. That’s… a lot.
Even more frustrating, it insists on hanging much of its second- and third-act narrative weight on dipping back into the misbegotten Man of Steel by reliving the General Zod attack for the third time in franchise history. There’s a narrative reason for it; after Barry changes the past, he unintentionally creates a world with no superheroes to defend Earth against Zod’s attack. As a plot point, that actually isn’t a bad idea, as it creates a cohesion between the scattershot DCEU films that barely exists otherwise. Unfortunately though, in practical terms, it only serves to remind non-Snyder Bro DC fans that, yes, Zack Snyder was once at the helm of the franchise, and because the producers can’t seem to NOT cater to his very vocal and toxic fanbase’s whims, they have to throw red meat to that particular beast just to keep them happy.
With competent producers and studio heads and a firmer foundation, there’s reason to believe that, with some changes, The Flash might have juggled all of this and made it work. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case, and the film that remains is full of ideas that almost work… but not quite.
You Can’t Hang the Whole Movie on Cameos
As soon as it was announced that Michael Keaton would be reprising his legendary Batman role in The Flash, that was what fans wanted to see the most. Not the Flash. Certainly not Ezra Miller. But Keaton’s Batman. And with good reason: for a generation of fans, there can be only one. That summer of 1989 was a legitimate cultural phenomenon in that pre-internet age that can never happen again; the Bat-logo was on everything: shirts, stickers, toys, Trapper Keepers, Frisbees, lunch boxes – you name it, it was there. It was suddenly cool to like a comic book character, and that all came down to how unexpectedly awesome Keaton was in the role.
His Bruce Wayne was stiff and aloof and slightly off-kilter with the rest of society around him; he always had his eye on the door just in case he needed to run off and go tell some ne’er-do-well, “I’m Batman.” His Batman was pure molded physique that couldn’t turn his neck and had pretty limited hand-to-hand fighting capabilities but dammit, he looked just like you always imagined Batman would look. The greater public’s permanently-etched memory of Batman vis-a-vis the campy Batman ‘66 was permanently replaced with the grim, monosyllabic crusader who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. Keaton quite simply WAS Batman, so when he returned to the role that earned him the undying love of a generation of fans, there was no reason to be anything less than ecstatic.
Except… Keaton doesn’t exactly play that Batman. He plays A Batman, and certainly, the film works hard to throw in little nods and architectural and set flourishes to set fans’ minds at ease that yes, this is the guy they know and love. But by the film’s own admission, Barry altering the past is what changed the present to create the current timeline. Bruce explains (in a light dig at Marvel which earns a chuckle) that altering the past “doesn’t work like that” in that it won’t create new branching future timelines; rather, it creates an entirely new past, present, and future timeline running counter to the original one, which is why Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is so much older than the Batfleck that Barry is used to. So the case could be made that Barry’s actions inadvertently created the Batman/Batman Returns/Batman Forever/Batman & Robin timeline, but the film plays it coy and lets fans make up their own mind. That’s a moderately clever Choose Your Own Adventure spin in the right filmmaking hands, but as established above, The Flash isn’t the movie that has those hands guiding its till.
Either way – it can’t be ignored that Keaton’s Batman completely took over the marketing for this film as it chugged along. The first trailer solely hinged on the fan service of seeing him suited up again; the poster has a not-so-subtly small Flash absolutely dwarfed by a giant Batplane hanging above him. WB wasn’t exactly subtle about what they wanted fans to flock to theaters for. And when Keaton enters the film in its second act, the narrative focus switches from Barry to Bruce in a pretty transparent manner. The movie becomes The Michael Keaton Show (co-starring The Flash), which saps the narrative of its focus because, hey, WB went out of its way to condition fans to wait for it to happen anyway through its marketing.
But yet… was long-haired, bearded Batman what fans actually wanted? Was his story for why he hung up the suit all that convincing, or was it a contrivance? Hell, couldn’t the plot have worked the same if Batman had never retired at all? All of that backstory was completely unnecessary but was baked into the script to create more of a sense of pathos and urgency for Keaton’s Batman. What the script fails to understand is that fans don’t need that to care about Keaton’s Batman. Just having the guy there is plenty good enough; everything else is just fluff that detracts from the actual star of the movie, who, maybe, WB kind of wanted to sweep under the rug. They weren’t exactly subtle about nudging him out of the spotlight in the marketing, were they?
All of the film’s other cameos are the purest of fan service. Whether it was George Reeves, Christopher Reeves, the glorious Nicolas Cage Superman, and more – they’re there, and they’re fun, and some of them send chills up the spine in the best way possible. Looking back on grainy black-and-white George Reeves footage of Superman is a wonderful way to honor the past while tipping a hat to how far the DCEU has come. It also opens up the idea that any and all DC characters who have ever appeared on film are in some way fair game to be included in the multiverse, which is an extremely loving nod to one of the best things about the DCU in the first place.
But how many of the cameos were actually necessary? Fan service, when done right, creates gorgeous works of art like Across the Spider-Verse. But it’s a fine line from that to what we got in The Flash, which was essentially a highlight reel of greatest hits (and one Jon Peters-approved giant spider). And at the end of the day, all the pretty bells and whistles the film gives viewers can’t distract from the fact that it stars a very, very questionable star.
Which brings us to…
The Ezra Miller-Shaped Problem at the Heart of It All
Let’s be clear: Ezra Miller is not a good person.
They’ve physically abused women, psychologically manipulated the people around them, groomed a Sioux activist, and actually kidnapped a woman and her children. They’ve been arrested multiple times for disorderly public conduct in several states. They issued a weak mea culpa for their behavior and blamed it on “complex mental health,” then went right back to acting like a total monster to the people around them. There’s allegations that they half-heartedly started a cult around themself as some sort of messianic figure. They’ve managed to avoid serious jail time so far for their outrageous behavior, and has otherwise settled out of court more than once to get allegations to go away. Around a year ago, Miller’s extremely public meltdown was enough to warrant an emergency meeting of top WB brass to decide what to do about him.
At that point, the studio had already spent an exorbitant amount of money on the film, so shelving it was out of the question, yet digitally editing a new Flash actor in over Miller would be too costly. Given the alleged $200 million-plus WB had already sunk into the boondoggle, making some amount was better than making nothing. So, it seems the plan became a marketing campaign that seems to emphasize every other aspect of the story without directly acknowledging Miller as much as possible. Yes, the Flash is there, but there’s little to no close-ups of his face or out-of-costume shots are minimized as much as possible. Again, the trailer focuses almost exclusively on Keaton’s return to the Bat-suit as a means of titillating fans rather than spotlighting the sociopath in the lead role.
Looking at Flash’s paltry opening weekend, though, it seems that the sleight-of-hand marketing wasn’t enough to bait-and-switch fans. Sure, the hardcore DC fans, the general moviegoers, and the ones who didn’t believe the allegations against Miller came out. But it just wasn’t enough. Ezra Miller will clearly be done with the role of The Flash after this debacle; now that Gunn and Safran are in charge of the DCEU, and the films’ reality has been nominally reset, they have carte blanche to cast whoever they want in the role. Which is for the best – Ezra Miller clearly needs professional help, and being in the spotlight of a multi-million dollar film franchise isn’t conducive to that.
Fans, however, spoke loudest by staying home.
The Film Didn’t Do What It Set Out to Do
Once Gunn and Safran were announced as the DCEU’s new heads, The Flash was hyped as being the film that would turn the corner from the old DCEU to the new. This lead to a lot of expectations that Barry would change reality in such a way that the slate would be wiped clean so the new regime could start fresh.
That didn’t happen. Or did it? The film is frustratingly vague. Yes, there’s that cameo at the end that tells viewers that things have been altered. But to what extent? Was that cameo just for shits and giggles, one more truly unexpected bout of fan service? What the hell was going on with the drunken Aquaman scene post-credits? Did Barry actually ever go on a date with Iris? Did the events of Justice League (either cut) happen? Is Shazam still around? Are Blue Beetle or Aquaman 2 going to matter, or will they crash and burn like this film and Shazam: Fury of the Gods? Is Jason Momoa Lobo now? Will we ever see Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman again? The Flash offers no clear answers to any of these questions; and frankly, not even any hazy ones. Just like the bulk of the DCEU films before it – exceptions for the first Wonder Woman and Shazam films, respectively – The Flash is all surface and no substance. If it was intended to be a closing chapter on the old DCEU, it failed, and if it was meant to be a link between old and new DCEU, it failed. And frankly, fans knew it. $55 million against a reported $200 million budget plus an additional $100 million in marketing is chump change.
If The Flash really is the bookend to the first ten years of the DCEU, then its failure is an apt metaphor for the franchise as a whole: half-cooked, rushed, and not at all what fans were hoping for.
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