Tom Cruise lied, y’all.
Back in March, it was reported that Cruise told Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav that The Flash represented everything you could want in a film. “This is the kind of movie we need now,” Cruise told the new Warner chief and steward of HBOMax, according to insiders.
In fairness, Thomas Mapother IV wasn’t alone. For months, Hollywood’s elite and DCEU superfans treated The Flash like the second coming of Citizen Kane. James Gunn—recently installed as the head of DC Films—dubbed it one of the greatest superhero movies ever created. On Twitter, Stephen King called the movie “heartfelt, funny, and eye-popping.” Zaslav himself remarked at CinemaCon that it was “the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen.”
Zaslav, of course, had his reasons to hype up the film. Post-merger, Warner Bros. Discovery needed a win. Its two previous superhero movies, Black Adam and Shazam!: Fury of the Gods, bombed in spectacular fashion. And any respite that Gunn’s studio rebooting Superman could offer was two years away. So it would make sense that Warner’s PR apparatus seemed desperate to engineer a hyperbolic word-of-mouth campaign for its $220 million endeavor. (One with a star in Ezra Miller who has in recent years been charged with disorderly conduct, harassment, and burglary and been at the center of reports that they endangered a mother and her daughter.)
It’s against that backdrop that The Flash arrived in theaters last Friday. Thus far, it’s flopped, grossing $55 million at the domestic box office over the weekend and sporting the worst CinemaScore rating of any DCEU film. At any other time, The Flash could’ve been another bad-to-inconsequential comic book movie, a forgotten footnote for whatever overlords subsume the home of Bugs Bunny and Rick Sanchez next. Instead, corporate machinations and cultural gluttony sired something utterly soulless and then desperately tried to pull enough levers to fool the masses into regarding it with awe. The Flash isn’t just the conclusion of one version of DC (RIP, Snyderverse), but a dispiriting culmination of the great IP experiment. After decades of the studio system functioning as grave robbers, digging through our collective memory for any sign of luster, we’re left with a future so bleak it might as well not be a future at all.
The Flash is a deceptive watch. The first third of the movie largely works—the Flash pulling a baby out of a microwave notwithstanding—because the filmmakers seem hyper-aware of the modern superhero playbook.
Initially, director Andrés Muschietti and his collaborators deftly eschew the solo superhero movie quagmire. The opening set piece smartly intuits that at this stage in the comic book movie life cycle, the audience needs an origin story as much as Ja Morant needs Instagram Live. He’s a dude that runs fast and is friends with Batman—that’s all we need to care about. And unsurprisingly, The Flash is at its best when the stakes are the most simple. Sometimes it’s enough to watch a temporally inclined meta-human rescue CGI rubber-looking infants from a burning building while Batfleck blows up half the city, and shrug at the dumb absurdity of it all.
In these moments, Christina Hodson’s script is snappy and vibrant, running directly toward the inherent corniness of the entire endeavor instead of away from it. Rhythmically and tonally, the movie’s patter and jokes feel stewed in the MCU crockpot, piercing the self-serious bubble that dooms most DC cinematic offerings. Then, Flash travels back in time, and the movie begins to crumble.
At this juncture in human civilization, it should go without saying that if your movie is based around the multiverse—a concept rooted in infinite possibilities—then it should live up to the creative implications of that framing device. In a post–Everything Everywhere All at Once and Spider-Verse world, the bar is pretty high. Either your movie has a Mexican-Irish Spider-Man with a dump truck, or it withers on the vine.
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But instead of meeting the moment with something ludicrous and transcendent of its own, The Flash settles into a tepid Easter egg hunt cosplaying as Back to the Future. Couldn’t get enough of Miller’s twitchy and off-putting depiction of Barry Allen? How would you feel about getting double the dose of Miller in the film’s second and third act? And if Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne isn’t your thing, just imagine a world in which 2014’s Birdman never happened and Michael Keaton gets to deliver that one Batman catchphrase you kind of remembered that’s totally cool and not sad in the slightest. Also, Superman gets to be Supergirl in this one before her brutal impalement is placed on a CGI loop in one of the more ghastly examples of fridging in recent comic book movie memory. The Flash treats its alternate universe characters like toys, trotting them out to be admired, appraised, and dismembered—their value either too low or nonexistent to DC’s next phase to matter.
The problem with making a monument to past IP is that you need to have enough IP worth celebrating. Seeing George Clooney reprise his role as Bruce Wayne from his critically reviled Batman movies is the equivalent of Draymond Green watching Paul Pierce’s farewell tour. What am I supposed to feel seeing a ghastly de-aged Nicolas Cage as Superman fighting a giant spider? This is a reference to a scrapped Tim Burton Superman movie written by Kevin Smith, which feels designed to prop up the SEO explainer industrial complex. Did no one see the ghoulish reproduction of Christopher Reeve’s face and stop to think that it wasn’t a great idea to place one of America’s most beloved actors in the uncanny valley of a doomed project?
If your company doesn’t have enough beloved incarnations of its characters to sustain a feature-length multiversal film, maybe a good multiversal movie isn’t in the cards. Mainstream audiences don’t view The Flash like Spider-Man or the X-Men, properties drowning in years of Hollywood storytelling. DC doesn’t have an 18-movie runway like the MCU that can make narrative and emotional sense of all-out CGI slugfests like Avengers: Infinity War or Endgame. Besides a handful of good-to-great Batman films, there aren’t enough recent successes within DC’s live-action archives to mount a project of this scale. Especially when the actors that played the company’s most beloved figures have passed away (Christopher Reeve, Heath Ledger), are too decorated/expensive to appear in these movies again (Christian Bale, Halle Berry), or came from defunct broadcast TV universes (Grant Gustin, Stephen Amell).
In the end, The Flash plays like a B-sides compilation masquerading as a greatest hits album, where every misstep of a beleaguered superhero company is recontextualized as if it were a triumph. It’s a craven attempt to sell nostalgia to a populace that never loved the original goods in the first place. The Flash is a Frankenstein’s monster of a project, stitched together by various committees of previously fired and reshuffled regimes. Everyone from Ryan Reynolds to Adam Brody was meant to bring the speedster to life at some point. Rick Famuyiwa, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Seth Grahame-Smith, John Francis Daley, and Jonathan Michael Goldstein touched this movie in a directing or writing capacity before departing over creative differences. Over a two-hour-plus run time, there’s a sense you’re watching the ghost of Flash movies past, a scrapbook of disparate ideas from dead projects as incoherent as it is chaotic.
For the better part of the 21st century, superhero movies and the IP revolution they ushered in were seen as an all-consuming, inevitable force. Decades of low-cost source material left languishing in baby boomers’ attics and long boxes became a treasure trove of multimedia storytelling, easily automated for a global audience. The GDP of small countries was spent and made with the notion that the tap could never run dry—Hollywood’s entire infrastructure built around super-serving the toxic whims of a rabid audience. In the new order, the very idea of the movie star became obsolete. How could an actor and their talents be bigger than the children’s character they play? Any indie director with a pulse and an Oscar nomination got placed onto a conveyor belt to film dialogue scenes to wedge between previz CG made by vastly underpaid VFX workers.
Records were broken, streaming services launched, and the cats got fat. Even as the quality waned and the creatives themselves began to buckle under the expectation that their life’s work was to continue a never-ending green-screen story, nothing changed.
The business invested in the future of fictional property they could control, instead of the artists who gave those characters their worth in the first place. The Flash is just the latest symptom of a very American sickness. Our inability to let the past die is why Christopher Reeve’s face is sloppily recreated to sell a movie that’s befuddled a sea of creators year after year.
In a 1982 interview with Playgirl, Reeve spoke about the demolition of two historic Broadway theaters. The comic book movie boom was decades away, Superman III had yet to be released, but Reeve was still unsettled. “We have very little respect for our past, for the people and traditions that came before us,” he said about the demolition.
When asked about the future of American culture, he feared a world steeped in “dramatic material that poses no challenge” and of “rich people with no soul, comfortable and efficient but with no real life.”
It’s impossible to know whether Reeve’s conception of this moment was as cold and barren as our present reality. As his time donning the red cape gets further and further in the rearview, the superhero machine merely consumes his work and regurgitates it without context. There will always be another Superman, a Xerox of a Xerox, a dopamine hit disguised as a heartfelt cameo. If comic book movies proved anything, it’s that we live in an eternal fire sale. Everything and anything from childhood nostalgia to the faces of long-gone heroes is grist for the never-ending superhero mill. Integrity might be important for fictional heroes on-screen and some of the people who play them, but it’s never been integral to making those stories. And that’s especially true when you’re trying to sell the greatest superhero movie ever made.