It was billed (admittedly by the studio itself) as “probably one of the greatest superhero movies ever made”, the film to reset the multiverse just in time for James Gunn’s much-garlanded arrival as new DC head honcho. But while the box office greenbacks collected by any given movie are not always a valid mark of its long term place in the cinematic pantheon, The Flash’s $55m US opening last weekend has had industry types running in circles trying to find the door marked “box office bomb”.
The Hollywood Reporter said that the Andy Muschietti-directed superhero epic did even worse than 2009’s Watchmen, while Variety quoted an “industry insider” who described the film’s performance as an “unmitigated disaster” and pondered if the movie would even break even. Perhaps, its report suggested, audiences might even be growing tired of comic book movies altogether, given there have been 55 released in multiplexes over the past decade.
And yet the reality is that these gilded Hollywood bibles are read mostly by exactly the same kind of suits whose interference and inability to see the big picture has put DC in such a mess – in their incessant search for the big, quick, easy win. These are the same guys who decide to make Batman and Superman fight each other for absolutely no reason (OK, because pumped up, gun-toting Bats was a bit freaked out by an alien). The same executives who gave the final cut on Suicide Squad to some chaps who made some cool trailers. The idiots who let Joss Whedon fail to turn Justice League into a breezy banter-fest, when it had been conceived as a completely different movie by Zack Snyder.
The irony is that The Flash is a tonally even, poignant and at times beautifully shot multiverse flick with a bravura central performance from Ezra Miller and enough gorgeously realised Easter eggs to have Timothée Chalamet choking over his next Mars bar. It deserves to be seen by fans of comic book movies, and there are many who will (quite reasonably) suggest that Miller’s legal and ethical travails have effectively thrown Muschietti and his team under the box office bus. That line of thinking relies on the old-fashioned sense that 1. audiences keep an eye on the news and 2. are more likely to see a movie if they have seen its star on umpteen celebrity TV shows in the run-up to release day (Miller did just one red carpet appearance, making a brief speech to thank studio Warner Bros and the film’s creative team). But it is just not enough to explain away such an appalling opening.
Here’s another theory. Maybe, just maybe, audiences are not fed up with superhero movies after all. Perhaps they are just tired of turning out to see DC movies that are routinely average, only occasionally brilliant, and often the living embodiment of what happens to a film when it is overseen by too many cooks – think, the type with little experience in the culinary arts – and massive dollar signs in their eyes.
The best DC movies are those that under the new Gunn regime will be branded DC Elseworlds films, Todd Phillips’ Scorsese-channelling Joker and the stylishly gothic, Kurt Cobain-inspired The Batman, from the always reliable Matt Reeves. Neither is connected in any tangible way to the main thread of this comic book multiverse, and they are all the better for it. What does that say?
Remove these episodes from the pantheon and there is barely a single film from the last DC decade that will truly stand the test of time. Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman was a perfectly enjoyable, thrillingly conceived femme power superhero flick, while Gunn’s own The Suicide Squad proved that even the silliest of monstrous comic book titans can be perfectly realised on the big screen if you have the right level of screenwriting nous. Yet both fell just short of the top level reached by rival studio Marvel.
The irony for The Flash is that Muschietti has somehow managed to find a way to make sense of all the mulch of superhero mess that went before it, while resetting the central DC reality in a way that should allow Gunn to move forward without too much baggage. It’s the first movie from this studio in a long time that, for me, lived up to the standard of Marvel.
The sad thing is that it looks like few people will see it, most probably because they are scarred from watching all of DC’s other films. Gunn and his team have work to do.
