On June 16, 2023, Barry Allen, the quickest man alive, raced into theaters with The Flash. Whereas he caught round lengthy sufficient for the film to make again its manufacturing finances (however not its promoting finances), it quickly limped away, placing an official finish to the pre-James Gunn DCEU.
In keeping with director Andy Muschietti, it was everybody else’s fault. Whereas on the press tour for his upcoming HBO Max collection It: Welcome to Derry, Muschietti informed The Playlist that dangerous phrase of mouth tripped up The Flash. He continued, acknowledging the truth of the movie’s poor field workplace efficiency. “Lots of people didn’t see it. However you understand how issues are lately — folks don’t see issues, however they like to speak s*** about it, and so they like to leap on bandwagons,” he argued. “They don’t actually know. Persons are indignant for causes which can be unrelated to those issues.”
In Muschietti’s protection, The Flash confronted unimaginable dangerous buzz by the point it made it to theaters. Preproduction on the film started in 2016, and it cycled via therapies, scripts, and administrators earlier than lastly arriving on screens. Within the meantime, star Ezra Miller’s conduct grew to become an everyday a part of the brand new cycle, making it tougher for folks to see them as likable hero Barry Allen. Actually, Miller’s issues had been exacerbated by the truth that Grant Gustin was taking part in the identical character on the CW collection The Flash, and had garnered way more enthusiasm from viewers.
After which there’s the shared universe difficulty. Gunn and Peter Safran had been named co-heads of DC Studios in October 2022, and had already introduced plans to reboot the DCU. Whereas the Flashpoint storyline, wherein Barry recreates actuality after going again in time to save lots of his mom, gave the movie a narrative cause to reset the universe, followers noticed the film as a lame duck, a remnant of occasions previous—a degree solely underscored by bringing again Michael Keaton as Batman and Michael Shannon as Zod from Man of Metal, to say nothing of the film’s many controversial CGI-created cameos.
