I honestly cannot believe how big of a bomb The Flash has turned out to be. While not stellar, it was a pretty solid entry in the DC canon, but a combination of an unknown/controversial star, the DCEU dying and the failure of gimmicks like Keaton’s Batman meant that audiences simply did not show up.
As a result, The Flash will apparently lose Warner Bros. $200 million when all is said and done due to its high cost and low revenue. That makes it the biggest comic book movie bomb ever, and up there with famous flops like the also-$200-million-losing John Carter.
But if you ever needed a sign that DC needed to change things up, you can look at the overall comic book movie bomb list, which I saw being passed around the other day. In fact, six of the top 10 biggest bombs are from DC, and five of them are within the last three years. Practically every post-Aquaman DCEU movie.
Here’s the list:
- The Flash – $200m
- Shazam! Fury of the Gods – $150m
- Wonder Woman 1984 – $137m
- Dark Phoenix – $133m
- The Suicide Squad – $130m
- Black Adam – $100m
- Fantastic Four – $100m
- RIPD – $92m
- The New Mutants – $84m
- Green Lantern – $75m
The only non-DC/Marvel superhero film on the list is RIPD, which make Ryan Reynolds’ second movie on the list besides famous failure Green Lantern (but he’s since redeemed himself in the genre with Deadpool, of course).
Of the Marvel movies, none are in the MCU. There are two X-Men movies at the tail end of the FOX days, far from the glory of the original X-Men trilogy. And there’s the second stab at Fantastic Four, which was one of the worst superhero movies in recent memory.
As for DC, I guess you can explain each of them (and interestingly, there are no Zack Snyder movies on here, which I’m sure his fans love to see):
- The Flash, as I said, probably remains the biggest mystery, but has its combination of factors as to why audiences tuned out.
- Shazam 2 and Black Adam kind of killed each other, as they very obviously should have been one movie but The Rock’s ego would not allow that. Instead this entire corner of the DC universe got nuked and it feels like part of the reason Gunn was brought in, in order to make sure The Rock didn’t wrestle control of everything.
- The Suicide Squad was well-reviewed and liked by audiences, but it was both rated R and shared a practically identical name with the DCEU’s worst movie, which was confusing, so you can’t blame audiences for staying away.
- Wonder Woman 1984 may be the one we have to give a pass to, given that it was released same-day on HBO Max during the pandemic, and yet it was…also not good at all.
Strange times at DC, and we’ll see if the James Gunn/Superman Legacy era will start to turn this around.
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