It’s not looking good for The Flash. Warner Bros. had hyped the movie up as one of the greatest superhero movies of all time, clearly hoping for a long-overdue billion-dollar smash for the DC universe. Unfortunately, the public hasn’t agreed, as it’s received a terrible B ranking from CinemaScore and has had a disappointing first weekend, with projections now putting it below even Black Adam‘s disappointing performance.
Fingers are being pointed in all directions as to what went so badly wrong, though at least some blame must be apportioned to the lackluster CGI and action scenes. It’s already been underlined that The Flash has worse VFX than the decade-old Man of Steel, though another speedster has entered the chat to dunk all over Barry Allen’s antics.
We’re talking about Evan Peters’ Quicksilver, who blew audiences away in 2014 with X-Men: Days of Future Past‘s astonishing rescue of Magneto:
We can only agree. The Flash had the budget to match this, but couldn’t manage anything even remotely as cool:
All credit to Days of Future Past for making this work so well:
As for what might have gone wrong here, we have some ideas:
Another swing and a miss from Warner Bros.:
Sadly for Flash fans, his first solo adventure shaping up to be a colossal box office bomb doesn’t bode well for a sequel. That said, we wouldn’t be surprised to see another take on Barry Allen somewhere down the line in James Gunn’s rebooted DCU. If and when that happens, here’s hoping they ditch Ezra Miller and take a cold hard look at the Quicksilver action sequences from the X-Universe for inspiration.
The Flash is now in theaters.