Why am I closely watching “The Flash” at the box-office? Because it could very well tell a bigger story about the marketable sustainability of superhero movies in Hollywood.
“The Flash” completely collapsed this past weekend at the box-office. Andy Muschietti’s film fell 75 percent from its weak $55 million start, adding only $15 million to the weekend.
Its domestic total now stands at an embarrassing $87 million. The International numbers are better at $123 million, but that will not be enough to save it from movie oblivion, and that’s exactly where this movie is headed.
Via Box-Office whiz Luis Fernando:
Painful, but it needs to be mentioned: if The Flash ends up within current projections, since the studio keeps just half the share from global grosses, it won’t even pay its total 150M marketing campaign. WB would have lost less money releasing it on Max, or not releasing it at all.
Not to mention apart from the expensive promo campaign, The Flash still has a 190M budget price tag. This film may easily lose more than 200M for WB when all is said and done, a financial catastrophe as dangerous as Justice League, which led to a major shakeup at WB in 2017.
The hard question to be asked is: what happens to the WBD’s finances if Blue Beetle & Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom end up being financial disasters as well? Will WB afford producing Comic Book movies in 2024 without cutting their budgets considerably? Will investors risk their $ again at WB?
So if it makes $250M, it loses $25M + an extra $200M-$220M from production costs for an estimated $225M - $245M loss. Gotcha. That’s disastrous. It would actually be worse than “John Carter” which only lost $200M.
Then again, we still don’t really know the actual budget of “The Flash”. Warner Bros keep playing games with us about the production cost of the film. It was $190 Million a few months ago and now some reports are saying $220 million, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the budget was even higher than that.
Add this to Warner’s ‘Shazam 2’ losses, estimated at around $150 million, and you have David Zaslav hitting panic button after panic button, even goes as far as to gut TCM staff this past week. Let’s hope “Barbie” isn’t the next one to bomb for him.
This could lead to a shapeshifting moment. Does Warner Bros keep James Gunn or just scrap his entire plan for a rebooted DCEU?
At this point, Gunn’s universe needs to be delayed as much as possible so that moviegoers see absolutely no connection between his upcoming batch of films and the toxic Snyderverse.
Of course, we all know the rule: take these reactions with a grain of salt rather than treating them as gospel. Still, I will say that the film tested like gangbusters earlier this year, and Lionsgate clearly has confidence.