Next Batman Director Blames Bandwagons for The Flash’s Flop

On June 16, 2023, Barry Allen, the fastest man alive, raced into theaters with The Flash. While he stuck around long enough for the movie to make back its production budget (but not its advertising budget), it soon limped away, putting an official end to the pre-James Gunn DCEU.

According to director Andy Muschietti, it was everyone else’s fault. While on the press tour for his upcoming HBO Max series It: Welcome to Derry, Muschietti told The Playlist that bad word of mouth tripped up The Flash. He continued, acknowledging the reality of the film’s poor box office performance. “A lot of people did not see it. But you know how things are these days — people don’t see things, but they like to talk s*** about it, and they like to jump on bandwagons,” he argued. “They don’t really know. People are angry for reasons that are unrelated to these things.”

In Muschietti’s defense, The Flash faced incredible bad buzz by the time it made it to theaters. Preproduction on the movie began in 2016, and it cycled through treatments, scripts, and directors before finally arriving on screens. In the meantime, star Ezra Miller’s behavior became a regular part of the new cycle, making it harder for people to see them as likable hero Barry Allen. In fact, Miller’s problems were exacerbated by the fact that Grant Gustin was playing the same character on the CW series The Flash, and had garnered far more enthusiasm from viewers.

And then there’s the shared universe issue. Gunn and Peter Safran were named co-heads of DC Studios in October 2022, and had already announced plans to reboot the DCU. While the Flashpoint storyline, in which Barry recreates reality after going back in time to save his mother, gave the film a story reason to reset the universe, fans saw the movie as a lame duck, a remnant of times past—a point only underscored by bringing back Michael Keaton as Batman and Michael Shannon as Zod from Man of Steel, to say nothing of the movie’s many controversial CGI-created cameos.

Thus, Muschietti’s not exactly wrong to say that “sometimes there’s a headwind” challenging a project, and that’s certainly the case with The Flash. Furthermore, many who did see The Flash did like the film. Currently, the movie has a 63% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which means that a majority of the surveyed critics gave it a positive review. Den of Geek‘s own four-star review raved, “The Flash is everything that much of the last 10 years of DC-based movies have not been: It’s fast-paced, character-driven, and, most importantly, in love with the comics and the iconic superheroes themselves.”

Perhaps most importantly of all, current DC Studios bosses Gunn and Safran must have seen The Flash and also liked it, as they have picked Muschietti to helm the highly anticipated Batman film The Brave and the Bold. So Muschietti has reason not just reason to say he’s “very proud” of The Flash and to call it “a good movie,” but also reason to believe that more people will come to his next superhero outing when The Brave and the Bold swoops into theaters.