After spending so long in development hell, The Flash really came and went in 2023, huh? Warner Bros. sure put a lot of effort into making sure people knew it was coming, but audiences ultimately bounced off it pretty hard amid a year of superhero movies fizzling in theaters.
To director Andy Muschietti, the film’s biggest failing was that it didn’t fully find its audience. In a translated interview with Argentinian outlet Radio TU, he said it wasn’t a proper “4-quadrant” movie: one that appealed to male and female demographics both over and under the age of 25 years old. “When you spend $200 million making a movie, Warner wants to bring even your grandmother to theaters, and The Flash failed at that,” he explained. And while he acknowledged other factors could’ve played a hand in thngs, like a case of superhero fatigue that year and the troubling allegations surrounding lead actor Ezra Miller at the time, he felt not a lot of audiences care about the Scarlet Speedster, “particularly two female quadrants,” backed up by box office reports at the time revealing its demographic split leaned heavily towards men.
Sobre o fracasso de #TheFlash, o diretor, Andy Muschietti desabafa:
"Muitas pessoas não estão interessadas no Flash como personagem, a metade pública disso os quatro quadrantes, os dois quadrantes femininos há muitas mulheres que não estão interessadas no Flash como personagem" pic.twitter.com/XdFJsixxwp
— Flash Legacy Brasil (@FlashLegacyBR) January 12, 2025
Everyone had their own individual reasons for avoiding The Flash, be it everything surrounding Miller or just thinking it didn’t look like appointment viewing. The bit about folks not caring about Flash is…well, the CW’s long-running show (which wrapped weeks before the movie hit) partially puts that to bed. What Muschietti likely means is that audiences didn’t care about the DCEU version, which is also a problem with the movies. Miller’s take on Barry Allen got some cool action bits, but there wasn’t really anything to make people care about him like they did (and still do) with that universe’s other collection of characters, or would-be heroes like Green Lantern.
The Flash’s cinematic future is currently up in the air right now, ditto any DC character not in Superman or Muschietti’s Brave & the Bold. But if and when the speedster comes back, maybe make a version of him people like that isn’t just mostly cribbed from Tom Holland’s Spider-Man?
[via Flash Legacy Brasil]
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