Let’s be honest, what could Andy Muschietti and company possibly have done differently to rescue The Flash from its ill-fated time in theaters? Relatively lackluster reviews never stopped Thor: Love and Thunder from pulling in a pretty penny, but even if it was marked as the superhero genre’s equivalent to Citizen Kane, associations with the sinking DC Extended Universe ship and the controversial Ezra Miller would have sealed its fate all the same.
The idea that changing up the content of the film would have somehow improved The Flash‘s luck at the box office is nothing short of absurd, and that’s without getting into some of the proposed ideas that have been floated on r/DC_Cinematic, the latest of which involves a Keaton-Clooney shakeup.
In an alternate universe, George Clooney was the one who took up the mantle of the Caped Crusader for most of The Flash‘s runtime, while Michael Keaton was the one who showed up at the very end and turned Barry Allen’s world upside down one last time before the credits rolled. And, in that universe, it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference; in fact, according to the Reddit masses, it just might have been worse for everyone involved.
I would go as far as to say that, from a purely in-film content perspective, The Flash arguably had the most solid claim to being worthy of success. Say what you will about the dire visual effects (that likely came as a result of burning the VFX artists out, by the way), but of all the superhero movies that have come out in recent years, it seemed the least afraid of deviating from what we’ve come to expect, and while that decision came with about as many benefits as it did hindrances, we may retroactively come to admire the noble failure for shattering the mold the way it did.