The Flash and Elemental are Massive Bombs
Dads stayed away from the movies this Father’s Day weekend – along with everyone else. Two big movie premiered on Friday: Warner Bros./DC’s The Flash and Disney/Pixar’s Elemental. Neither was tracking well; The Flash was predicted to bring in $70 million, while Elemental was looking at a $35 million take. These are already shockingly low numbers, especially for The Flash, which officially cost around $220 million to make, but probably cost upwards of $300 million after the massive reshoots, extensive marketing campaign, and sitting on the shelf for a while. $70 million would have been such a bad haul that some were surmising that Warner Bros. intentionally lowballed it so that the ultimate take would look better than it actually was. Elemental cost $200 million, which also made its box office tracking grim.
But at this point, Warner Bros. and Disney would pray for grim. Both films underperformed their meager tracking numbers… bigly, in The Flash’s case. The superhero mashup brought in just $55 million from Friday through Sunday, while Elemental earned $29.5 million. Compared to similar films, The Flash’s opening weekend is lower than those of Shazam!: Fury of the Gods, Black Adam, Black Widow, and Eternals, three unquestioned bombs, while Elemental’s is the lowest opening weekend box office for a Pixar film. Internationally, The Flash made $75 million, bringing its worldwide haul to $139 million; Elemental was able to scare up just $15 million. Neither of these movies is going to make its money back, and they’re going to lose their studios a ton. The Flash is expected to take in $300 million when all is said and done, losing Warner Bros. $300 million, while Elemental will not even earn its reported $200 million production budget. If you want some perspective on this, Cutthroat Island is still considered one of the biggest bombs in box office history, and it lost $147 million adjusted for inflation. These are unmitigated disasters for Warner Bros. and Disney, gigantic bombs exploding just when the studios desperately need hits.
#Elemental just had the worst opening in Pixar history with $29M domestically.
Catastrophic situation for the $200M budgeted film that’s currently tracking to not even make $200M worldwide which would be less than:
– Lightyear
– The Good Dinosaur
– Emoji Movie
– DC League of… pic.twitter.com/yketvytv8W— Media & Money (@nextmediaxyz) June 18, 2023
And if you really want a laugh, the director of The Flash, Andy Muschietti, was just confirmed to be directing the next Batman movie.
So, why did this happen, and what does it mean? I can’t say a whole lot about Elemental because I haven’t seen it; I don’t usually watch animated movies, and despite liking the three or four Pixar films I’ve seen, they never really draw me to the theater. But from what I can observe, Pixar simply isn’t what it used to be, and they’ve lost their audience’s trust. The last few weren’t particularly well received, so maybe nobody wanted to roll the dice on the new one. There’s also the backlash against Disney that’s been happening for some time now; people are tired of the agenda they’ve been forcing into every aspect of their brand, no matter how disturbing or creepy it gets. Funnily, Elemental apparently has a non-binary character with Ezra Miller pronouns in it, but Disney didn’t advertise that – it was a neat surprise for parents of young children, who are Pixar’s main audience. Two things about this are important: first, this isn’t why Elemental bombed because nobody knew about it till they either saw it or heard about it from someone who did; second, Disney is hiding this stuff now rather than shouting it from the rooftops, meaning they know people don’t want to see it in kids’ movies. I can’t imagine this doing much to win back their customers’ trust.
As for The Flash, I think its horrendous box office is the result of several factors. The primary one is similar to Elemental’s: the DC brand is not trusted anymore. Outside of Wonder Woman, Shazam!, and Aquaman and maybe Man of Steel, the DCEU is not well-liked, and none of the recent releases has been successful. Wonder Woman 1984 arrived during the COVID lockdowns and debuted on HBO alongside its theatrical run, but even so, it’s pretty much universally agreed that it was awful; the same happened to The Suicide Squad, except people seemed to like it; Birds of Prey bombed; Black Adam bombed; Shazam!: Fury of the Gods (which I liked) bombed; and now, The Flash is bombing bigger than any of them. Couple those disappointments with Marvel’s mostly atrocious recent output, and people are growing tired of being burned by superhero movies, especially those from a brand that never had Marvel’s track record. For The Flash, I think people saw the writing on the wall; outside of Batman, nothing about this movie looked all that good, and that’s pretty much how things played out in the film itself. The marketing focusing so much on Batman screamed “bait and switch,” and after watching so many classic characters return to theaters only to be humiliated and replaced, that’s not the draw it once was.
There’s also the reasoning behind that Batman-centric marketing push: Ezra Miller. His real-life actions aren’t the only reason, but they’re certainly part of it. The media focuses on the assaults and break-ins, which are bad but not the worst of what he’s accused of doing; they conveniently leave out things like grooming underage girls, child molestation, and endangering young kids with guns and drugs. (They do, however, make sure to use his preferred pronouns, which his friends say is a farce anyway.) I believe in separating the art from the artist, and I think most people generally do, too, but some of these things are difficult to overlook, especially when, to my knowledge, Miller has not denied any of them, even when he had the opportunity to do so. I think it’s safe to assume a lot of moviegoers don’t want to watch this guy prancing around the screen when they’re trying to enjoy a superhero movie, and Warner Bros. damn well knew it when they minimized his involvement with the marketing campaign.
But it’s more than just his alleged crime spree. Ezra Miller is awful as the Flash. He’s corny, doofy, unconvincing in dramatic scenes, constantly mugging for the camera, and just generally annoying. Many have talked about the ridiculous poses he strikes as he runs at super speed – he looks like he’s throwing a discus. That’s back in The Flash, and it undercuts the awe you should feel watching a superhero do his thing. This was bad enough in Justice League when he was part of a team, but he’s the lead in The Flash, and he’s in almost every scene; sometimes, there are two of him. That’s a lot of cringe to sit through when you’re trying to have fun and see some cool superhero action. And the trailers didn’t hide this very well; while they focused on the dramatic stuff as much as possible, there were still the shots of him doing that stupid rap dance while he crossed the street and taking a selfie of Supergirl as she flew beside the Batwing, and people knew they were in for more eye-roll-inducing buffoonery.
The quality of either film, outside of what can be gleaned from the trailers, was not an issue this weekend, but it will be next weekend and beyond. The Flash is a bad movie, with Batman and Supergirl as its only bright spots, and it received a B CinemaScore, which is not good, especially for what should be a crowd-pleaser. Elemental is on much better footing with an A, but considering how low its opening weekend box office was, how much can that help? Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 also got an A CinemaScore, and that helped its overall take, but it made more than triple what Elemental did in its opening weekend. These two are dead in the water, and the slow bleeding of Hollywood continues. Or, as the Critical Drinker put it:
Brutal. Wonder how Blue Beetle's going to do? https://t.co/pjutRj2LQj
— The Critical Drinker (@TheCriticalDri2) June 19, 2023
