Hollywood Learns All the Wrong Lessons From ‘The Flash’s Disappointing Opening. As Usual.

Articles like this one at Deadline Hollywood, or this one at CNN.com try to give “reasons” for films not doing as well at the box office as studios would like. With the latest comic book-adapted epic The Flash currently sitting at $64M for its opening weekend, according to Box Office Mojo, the conversation has started up again.

The budget for The Flash was somewhere around $200-220M, but Hollywood also spends a ton of money on marketing in addition to budget figures like that, meaning The Flash has a lot of ground to make up. As Variety points out, whether or not The Flash is ultimately deemed a financial success will depend on whether its total box office haul ends up more in line with Aquaman or Black Adam. Both of those films opened to similar numbers, but the former went on to make over a billion dollars worldwide (easily earning its forthcoming sequel) while the latter came in at only about $393 million and certainly wasn’t treated as a success by the studio.

No one told you to spend that much, Warner Bros.! Obviously, something needs to be spent on marketing, but with properties like DC’s pantheon of comic heroes, it’s not like brand recognition is an issue! If you’re not making a profit over what you’ve spent, a lot of that is a “you problem.”

Studios hemorrhage hundreds of millions of dollars on films when no one asked them to, only to get skittish when they have trouble making their money back, and somehow it’s the audience’s fault rather than their own. And entertainment industry press never gets to the far more understandable reasons more people didn’t see a movie in the theaters. Reasons like:

1. Hey, maybe people didn’t want to see a movie starring Ezra Miller, because they’ve been hella problematic and abusive for the better part of the past decade. The above articles cite Miller not doing more press as the problem, but Miller doing press would’ve been more fodder for those who recognize that profiting off of an abuser’s work is a problem.
2. As much as everyone wants to believe otherwise, COVID is still a thing. Even if movie audiences are still going to theaters, they’re being way more selective not just for financial reasons, but because there are fewer movies they’re willing to sit in a crowd for.
3. Few in Hollywood want to acknowledge franchise fatigue or the lack of originality in the stories they’re selling us. Perhaps fewer people want to see The Flash because fewer people care about movies starring Justice League members. That window may have passed, and The Flash was delayed for too long. I anticipate better for Blue Beetle, because he’s unrelated to the Justice League and allows the DCU to move into new territory. Blue Beetle is also a charming-looking movie that will appeal to Latine audiences (who make up a majority of movie ticket buyers despite only having 7% of the leads in film while being 19% of the U.S. population).

Elemental is brought up with The Flash as a flop in the above articles, having opened the same weekend to even less money. Now, when I saw the trailer, I thought, “So … it’s Inside Out, but with elements?” Nothing about the trailer really grabbed me, and I had no interest in seeing it.

Meanwhile, Turning Red was wholly original and got me excited immediately, as did Soul! If either of them had been released in theaters, those would’ve been films that would’ve gotten me to leave the house.

Hollywood keeps trying to make their flops about everything other than studios needing to change their approach to the stories they release into the world. Until they learn what audiences actually want (rather than what they think they want) and figure out how to better monetize and compensate creators for streaming content being viewed at home, “opening weekend box office” will continue to be in trouble.

(featured image: Warner Bros.)