‘Flash’ is disappointing at the box office with a US box office receipt of a meager $55 million during its first weekend in theaters, a number below the $70 that Warner had hoped to achieve. A failure that is not only due to problems mentionedLike its digital effects or its glut of gratuitous cameos, DC’s problem has to do with a general exhaustion of superhero cinema and its tendency to replace solid stories with unexcused appearances.
In general, there is alarm in Hollywood due to the poor box office at the gates of summer, but if we analyze the four flops of these two weeks we find that ‘Elemental’ is once again the same Pixar movie with different themes to humanize “things”. ‘Transformers’ is in its seventh movie that no one has asked for and ‘The Little Mermaid’ is the second Disney live-action remake in less than a month. Not to mention the disappointment with ‘Fast X’ which, in case no one had noticed, has a 10 in the title. We can say that there a general tendency to exploit.
‘Flash’ is a movie that She alone explains Warner’s failure with her DC superhero project. Always behind Marvel, producing behind with the same formulas, thinking that it will work, and now with the happy idea of following the premiere of ‘Spiderman: crossing the multiverse’ the same month. That is to say, launching another one of multiverses, crossovers, superheroes and cameos less than 15 days after a hit with obvious similarities. A clinical eye on the play of waiting for the entire post-pandemic to get it out right now, perhaps commending that since Marvel’s is animated and for children, it would not affect.
From digital ugliness to graceless actors
A storm of executive factors gathers that may not be as important as creative results. Rarely had such an abysmal gap been seen between the first opinions of jubilation and the product that was actually released as in ‘Flash’, starting with some notable complaints about the low category of digital effects or its scene with monster babies that break through the valley of the uncanny in a supposedly funny moment, even though director Andy Muschietti wanted to get out of it by saying that they are that way on purpose.
But the problem with ‘Flash’, which has a mise-en-scène and photo finish that is above average for blockbusters, is not the CGI (which, yes, is truly horrendous on many different levels) or the actors with a deepfake worse executed than many fan videos, but a coarse, poor and disjointed script, that beyond managing to fit the parade of rescues On duty, it’s rife with crude dialogue, blush-blushing jokes, and confuses emotion with hardcore kitsch in a rude vacui horror of forced graces and last-minute changes. Even the highly criticized ‘Shazam 2’ is much more ingenious when it comes to inserting its humor.
Regardless of the controversies, Ezra Miller has never been very funny and in his transition from secondary to leading man he suffers the same mime complex from the worst days of the gesticulating Johnny Depp. Besides, Barry Allen’s alternate lookalike is so irritating, exhausting and redundant that when he meets Batman and he is amazed with his mouth open, trying to channel the emotion of the fan to the other side of the screen, you only think that this character does not deserve it, that he is not the one who should be there, living that moment .
Desperate to be nice
Nothing to object to Ezra’s ‘We have to talk about Kevin’, because he hardly opened his mouth and well, he was very credible scary. But since he appeared in ‘Perks of Being a Wallflower’ it’s impossible to believe him in funny or clown roles. And this is not helped by the little attempt to want to make visual gags in the style of the films of the first era of 3D animated cinema, when animated cinema wanted to be funny to captivate parentswith obvious pauses to insert laughter, and many resources intended to show where you should react that leave awkward silences and a sense of desperation to position itself as funny, all the while remembering that “hey, we are funny”.
But beyond these details, the definitive holocaust to the senses is its final stretch, an avalanche of wax faces that captures the worst of cameo culture, digital necrophilia and the manipulation of nostalgia. There is a living actor who could have appeared perfectly, but we witness a scene with his digital avatar half-baked. An exaggerated cascade of “surprise” memories that fail to move people, like triggers of emotion inserted with the same corporate mothballs that are beginning to turn the superhero blockbuster experience into a synthetic and repetitive “look who’s coming out now!”
Following the latest ‘Spider-Man’ movie, it is clear that the last frontier of the genre is the multiverses and the state of superhero cinema right now is the “Monster Mash” phase, or the “Ready Player One syndrome”, the attempt to equalize based on accumulation. This is well explained by looking at Marvel, which after its best creative cycle has resorted to parallel dimensions, with ‘Doctor Strange 2’ or ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’. ‘Flash’ has arrived to complete the cycle, with a new Supergirl, Tim Burton’s Batman and Ben Affleck’s, among other appearances that respond to the same bottleneck of superhero movies.
all to the bat
Sure, there’s an inevitable sense of excitement to seeing Michael Keaton as Batman, and he elicits exactly what was advertised, but his presentation is so predictable and to the letter that each new gag always happens when you expect it, every famous phrase that Danny Elfman gets to enunciate with fanfare goes where you know it will go. There’s no implied disaster, but it leaves the feeling that he could have had a twist that you know won’t happen. There is not even a proposal that differs or changes what is seen in the fiction of the character.
When analyzing the failure of this ‘Flash’, it seems to be forgotten that the wonderful CW series has already adapted Flashpoint, with an exact plot and a more satisfactory resolution. The movie he doesn’t even jump at the possibility of bringing the TV incarnations of the hero to the big screen, but rather makes it clear that the mythomania of the comic itself is not as interested as that of other characters that create more interest for the non-comics viewer. That is why we have family cameos even in the final shot and another as a gift in the embarrassing post-credits scene.
The box office results of ‘Flash’ may be an oracle for DC and the entire superhero genre. Regardless of whether or not he deserves his economic setback Something positive should be taken from the message that the public has sent in the last four failures of the last six premieres of the subgenre: recovering relics for a dollar to get the public to point to the screen is not enough to motivate, excite and interest the viewer again. Something that the James Gunn stage of DC and the phases that are to come in the MCU should take good note of.
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