When is a win not a win? When you’re a mega-franchise superhero movie that earns just $55.1 million.
The Flash, the latest addition to the in-flux DC Universe, raced to an estimated $55.1 million opening-weekend victory in North America, far outpacing the pack. But that’s well under the $65-70 million that most prognosticators had expected from The Flash, and it’s far behind what 2023’s other major superhero movies mustered in their openers.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania all cleared the $100 million hurdle in their opening frames. Only The Flash’s second-tier DC stablemate Shazam! Fury of the Gods clocked in with less, and it made its $30.1 million in the traditionally fallow month of March—not in the heart of the summer blockbuster season.
The Flash did a bit better overseas, though the movie’s international grosses were paradoxically sluggish. It earned $75 million outside North America, bringing its total global tally to an estimated $139 million.
Experts have offered plenty of reasons for The Flash’s failure to launch, first among them the troubling legal/personal troubles of star Ezra Miller. Miller (who identifies as nonbinary) has been arrested several times on charges ranging from disorderly conduct, burglary and assault, and he’s been accused of grooming a girl beginning when she was 12 years old. Miller obviously didn’t do a lot of publicity leading up to The Flash, which experts say hurt the film. It’s also possible that potential moviegoers might’ve just soured on the idea of a Miller-led movie.
But The Flash wasn’t the only new release to struggle out of the gate. Disney/Pixar’s Elemental also fell a bit below expectations. Though his animated romance earned $29.5 million to finish second, that’s about $5 million shy of what most experts felt the film would likely take. It was also the second-lowest Pixar debut ever, just beating out the original Toy Story’s bow of $29.1 million (which would be about $57.6 million adjust for inflation today) back in 1995.
It seems as though Elemental would’ve been a hard sell to its target audience: The film is, in many ways, an animated romcom, and kids are notoriously averse to romance. (Insert Fred Savage from The Princess Bride: “Do we have to read the kissing parts?”) It’s also possible that The Flash and Elemental might’ve cannibalized each other’s audience, too. After all, moviegoers only have so much money to spend in a given weekend.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse swung straight into third place with $27.8 million. That pushed its overall earnings to $280.4 million.
Last week’s champ, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, lost more than two-thirds of its weekend-over-weekend audience and earned just $20 million. That translates to a fourth-place finish. Given its sudden low visibility at the multiplex, would that make it a movie in disguise?
The Little Mermaid closed out the top five with an $11.6 million weekend. That left the weekend’s third wide release, The Blackening, on the outside looking in. It scared up $6 million to finish sixth.
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