Ryan Reynolds has spent the last 12 years railing against Green Lantern, which just so happened to be a $200 million DC Comics adaptation with plenty of questionable CGI that ended up crashing and burning at the box office in spectacular fashion.
As recently as a month ago, it would have sounded preposterous to place The Flash in the same ocean never mind the same boat given the unstoppable hype train, but it would also be an understatement to say that all of the carriages have derailed and then flown off the top of a very high cliff and then been crushed into nothingness at the bottom.
Thanks to The Flash‘s three-day opening weekend coming in even lower than expected at $55 million, it only ended up less than $3 million ahead of Green Lantern‘s debut, with Martin Campbell’s massive misfire ultimately conspiring to lose an estimated $184 million for Warner Bros. by the time the dust had settled.
One tiny little positive is that The Flash is set to top the domestic charts again this weekend in the face of very little competition, but it’s still only tracking 5 percent ahead of Green Lantern in comparable week-to-week earnings, and that’s without even taking a dozen years of ticket price inflation into account.
There’s a reason why it’s being predicted to go down as one of the biggest flops of all-time, and remaining neck-and-neck with another title deserving of such an unwanted reputation only serves to hammer it home even further.