‘Particularly the two female quadrants’: Andy Muschietti claims ‘The Flash’ flopped because of women rather than Ezra Miller’s controversies
The Flash director Andy Muschietti claims the film’s poor box office performance was due to people, particularly women, not liking the superhero character.
When it premiered in 2023, The Flash was riddled with controversy. The biggest controversy, of course, was that Warner Bros. opted not to recast Miller despite the actor’s steadily growing list of legal troubles at the time. From 2020 – 2022, the actor was hit with numerous allegations of assault and harassment, culminating in their arrest on felony burglary charges in Vermont. Yet, Warner Bros. ignored calls and campaigns to recast the role of Barry Allen. On top of that, Warner Bors. Discovery announced before The Flash‘s release that James Gunn and Peter Safran were taking over DC Films and likely rebooting the DCU, making The Flash less appealing as one of the final films of a scrapped cinematic universe.
While individuals from Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav to Gunn hyped up The Flash as an amazing superhero film, viewers weren’t impressed. The film grossed just over $270 million on a budget of $200+ million, with experts labeling it nothing short of an “unmitigated disaster.” Between the dying DCEU, poor film quality, and Miller, the reasons for the flop likely felt fairly clear to most. Yet, even over a year after the fact, individuals like Muschietti still treat the flop as a mystery and look anywhere but at Miller or within DC for the cause.
Andy Muschietti claims people just don’t like The Flash
During a recent appearance on Radio TU’s La Baulera Del Coso, Muschietti discussed his theory for why The Flash flopped. While he did mention the legal troubles of Miller, he honed in on alleged disinterest in the character. According to him, the movie flopped because it didn’t appeal to the four quadrants or four major demographics. He explained, “The Flash failed, among all the other reasons, 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 Bros.] wants to bring even your grandmother to the theaters.”
Muschietti claimed he’d come to learn that people simply don’t like or care about The Flash, especially women. He stated, “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.” It’s not uncommon in either the DC or Marvel spheres for studios and executives to hone in on women as one of the factors in a film’s flop. Following the flops of The Marvels and Madam Web, rather than looking at how these films were mishandled, insiders claimed Sony concluded that women just weren’t “enough to carry the box office” in the superhero genre.
To be fair, ticket purchase demographics for The Flash confirm that the movie brought in far fewer women than men. However, claiming that it’s just because women don’t like The Flash or the superhero genre feels like a simplification of the matter. After all, there’s evidence that both men and women do like the character, considering The Flash TV show ran for nine seasons and became one of the CW’s most-watched shows ever. The lack of women watching The Flash movie could indicate women are less likely than men to brush off Miller’s controversies or perhaps less enthused about a film that offered little more than entertainment value.
Relying on the simplistic conclusion that “Women just don’t like The Flash” raises concerns that Warner Bros. and DC Studios will not investigate the real reasons women didn’t like the movie. The poor turnout could be a sign of so many things, such as that audiences pay more attention to off-screen controversy than one might have guessed, that people don’t appreciate CGI replicating the likeness of deceased actors, or that no one wants to watch a movie after its cinematic universe is confirmed to be ending. Studios could likely stand to learn a lot from evaluating these flops but, unfortunately, only seem interested in investigating at the surface level.
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