DC Needs a Win – but ‘The Flash’ Faces a Fight at the Box Office
After months of hype and behind-the-scenes controversy, Warner Bros. is finally set to release its big DC summer blockbuster “The Flash,” which box office tracking predicts won’t reach the heights of recent superhero hits like “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” or “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” but has a shot to do better than recent DC flops like “Black Adam” and “Shazam! Fury of the Gods.”
Projections for “The Flash” have ranged widely. Some rival distributors predict a start as low as $65 million while some independent trackers are putting it as high as $85 million, though most tracking is settling in the range of $70 million-$75 million. Anything over $67 million would top the opening of last summer’s “Black Adam,” which went on to only gross $393 million worldwide against a $200 million production budget before marketing costs.
An opening for “The Flash” in that range would also be more than double the anemic $30.1 million opening that “Shazam 2” earned this past spring, which went on to flop hard with just $133 million grossed worldwide against a $100 million budget. A script for a “Flash” sequel has already been written, but whether it’s greenlit depends on the current movie’s performance, insiders told TheWrap.
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“The Flash” hits theaters at a very strange time for DC. Its reported $220 million production budget and the immense confidence that Warner Bros. insiders have told TheWrap that the studio has had for months have put high expectations on this film to deliver. But that is somewhat offset by the transition period that DC Studios is in, as James Gunn and Peter Safran continue their work on the upcoming reboot of the superhero universe that will kick off with “Superman: Legacy” in 2025.
While DC films have been struggling with audience reputation over the past year or so, that reboot will offer the franchise a clean slate after this year, meaning films like “The Flash” and the upcoming “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” don’t have the pressure to preserve long-term interest the way films in the post-“Avengers: Endgame” Marvel Cinematic Universe do.
Still, Warner Bros. could really use a win this weekend. The last bonafide blockbuster hit the studio scored in theaters was the Oscar-nominated “Elvis,” which grossed $151 million in North America and $276 million worldwide almost a full year ago. Since then, the most success Warner has enjoyed is with the low-budget franchise horror film “Evil Dead Rise,” which made a successful shift from a planned Max-exclusive release to gross $146 million worldwide.
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To find a Warner Bros. release that grossed over $400 million, you have to go back more than a year to “The Batman,” which made $766 million globally in March 2022. It’s unlikely that “The Flash” will make that much barring a rave reception from both hardcore DC fans and general audiences. But even a good response could allow it to hold well against blockbuster competition like the currently playing “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” as well as upcoming titles like “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”
The big question is how much that reception will be affected by the arrests and violent behavior of the film’s lead star, Ezra Miller. History shows that such bad press tends to not have a tangible impact on a film’s box office, but it’s hard to say how much it will impact how general audiences talk about the film considering that a significant portion of the movie consists solely of interactions between two alternate versions of the eponymous hero, both played by Miller.
Currently, reviews for “The Flash” have leaned positive with a 71% Rotten Tomatoes score at time of writing; but whether sufficient post-release buzz builds among fans will come down to whether Miller wins them over in spite of their off-screen scandals and whether sufficient excitement builds around the return of Michael Keaton as Batman for the first time since “Batman Returns” in 1992. Gen X superhero fans will certainly go nuts for their generation’s Bruce Wayne, but it’s less certain whether Keaton will pique the interest of younger audiences.
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