It was less than a month ago that Warner Bros. was insisting that The Flash was “one of the greatest superhero movies of all time”. Now, after just two weeks at the box office, the Scarlet Speedster has smashed headlong into the brick wall of reality. The movie is terrible, features some of the worst VFX in a modern blockbuster, and audiences have rightly proven to be completely uninterested.
With ticket sales cratering, The Flash may end up as one of the biggest Hollywood financial losses of all time and potentially fail to even make its marketing budget back. So it’s perhaps understandable that Warner Bros. is now dragging The Flash behind the woodshed and going Old Yeller on its theatrical run:
It’s worth noting that the original plan for The Flash was for it to arrive on digital sometime in September, so being available for home viewing just one month from its theatrical release is as close as you’ll get to an admission of total defeat from Warner Bros.
We’d ordinarily expect heads to roll at Warner Bros. for making a film this financially disastrous, though David Zaslav isn’t going anywhere and new DCU head James Gunn can hardly be blamed for a movie that was essentially ready for release before he even took the reins.
Let’s just hope The Flash can at least be used as a cautionary tale of how not to make a superhero movie.
The Flash will land on digital services on July 18.