The bad press around WBD’s new superhero action movie misses the real reason why the movie isn’t doing boffo box office.
My son and I caught The Flash in IMAX on Father’s Day. It was fun! If you like popcorn movies and have any affection for the character, go see it… while you can.
The most telling ding on the movie—and on the last several years of DC movies in general—is that both William and I were pleasantly surprised that the movie was as much fun as it is. It’s the most Marvelous of the recent DC movies, with a tone and vibe like the MCU movies.
(Alert: a few mild spoilers ahead, but nothing you won’t have seen in any review of the movie.)
William’s canny observation was that it was only a Flash movie in the slight way that Captain America: Civil War was a Captain America movie. Civil War was really an Avengers movie where the scope was terrestrial rather than cosmic. With The Flash, none of the classic villains (Reverse Flash, Captain Cold, The Top) appeared… but Supergirl and several versions of Batman sure did.
Maybe Warner Bros. Discovery didn’t want to deploy the classic bad guys because The Flash on TheCW has been using them for nine years on television?
The media has been indulging itself in an aria of schadenfreude about the poor opening box office of The Flash. OK, sure, it didn’t do as well as the studio hoped, but I think that in general the coverage has missed the overarching context of why people aren’t racing out (get it?) to see The Flash.
I’m tired of multiverse stories. Aren’t you?
We’ve already seen four versions of this movie just in the last year and a half:
- Spider-Man: No Way Home (December 2021)
- Everything Everywhere All At Once (April 2022)
- Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (May 2022)
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (June 2023)
Three of these (No Way Home, EEAAO, and Spider-Verse 2) were terrific. Dr. Strange was OK. But I don’t know that I’d want to see Hamlet four times in 18 months (that’s a whole lot of indecision onstage), and I’m a Shakespearean!
I just saw Spider-Verse 2 last week. The Flash was… too soon.
And those four movies plus The Flash are hardly the only multiverse stories out there. Collider has a nice list (I’d forgotten about The Last Action Hero from 1993) of multiverse movies.
Without having to search anything, off the top of my mind, there are also: Star Trek, which explores the multiverse over and over (remember when Spock had a beard back in the 60s? or the first season of Discovery? or the entire Kelvin universe?), the comics in DC Comics where the multiverse grew so large that back in the 1980s the company tore everything down to the studs in Crisis on Infinite Earths, the old TV show Sliders, and thousands of sci fi books and short stories… all the way back to the 1941 Jorge Luis Borges story “The Garden of Forking Paths.”
Most time travel stories (and as my son points out The Flash is more of a “save the timeline” time travel story than a strict multiverse story) are functionally equivalent to multiverse stories because there are a lot of similar-but-slightly-distinct versions of characters, events, and locations that happen over and over.
Ironically, watching different versions of the multiverse story over and over itself starts to feel like the movie Groundhog Day, which is another kind of time travel story.
It’s not just multiverse fatigue: it’s also that studios are herd animals. So, from time to time we get different versions of the same movie at the same time.
The year of peak studio copy-and-paste syndrome was 1998.
Back in 1998, Disney (Touchstone) released Armageddon and Paramount/DreamWorks released Deep Impact—two acutely similar movies about big asteroids zooming towards Earth and what the people on the planet did in response. Armageddon did $554M and Deep Impact did $350M in box office, but there was profound deja vu the second time around.
Also in 1998, A Bug’s Life from Disney/Pixar and Antz from DreamWorks Animation told essentially the same animated story. Both were terrific, but the same year?
The Flash is fun, worth seeing if you like capes and spandex (which I do!), and a better experience in a crowded theater than it will be at home.
But I’m done with the multiverse for a while.
We’ve never had more talented creatives with more access to sharpest edge and lowest cost storytelling technologies. Can we please tell some new stories?
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