Advance Buzz Advance Schmuzz: Everyone Hates the Flash
With its disappointing weekend take of $55m, The Flash effectively spells the end of the DCEU.
It’s been 13 years since Warner Bros. for all intents and purposes launched the DC Extended Universe with the hiring of Zack Snyder. Envisioned as a counterpoint to the money geyser that was the burgeoning Marvel Comics Universe, the DCEU— as it became unofficially known—debuted in theatres with 2013’s Man of Steel. It was either an auspicious or inauspicious opening, depending on how you view director Snyder’s ensuing greyscale god-worship of the four-colour characters that have propped up DC Comics since 1938. Coming four years after the MCU’s informal debut in Iron Man, the movie’s wall-to-wall blitzkrieg of dour megafights signalled a very different approach than the zinger-laden Marvel movies.
But the superhero movie game should have been Warner’s to lose. The 80-year-old studio had the money, the talent, the history, and the experience—this was the studio, after all, that launched a thousand superhero movies with 1978’s Superman. It also had access to the best-known cape-and-tights crusaders in the world, since parent company Warner Entertainment owned both a movie studio and DC Comics. Marvel Studios was a mom-and-pop operation that had to borrow money and didn’t even have access to its best-known characters, including Spider-Man, the Hulk and the X-Men.
So what went wrong? It’s easy to point the finger at Snyder. After all, it was his Sturm und Drang style that seems to have frightened moviegoers, not to mention reviewers. But at the time he was hired, in 2010, he had proven himself as not only a director with a a remarkable visual style but one with some experience in the comic book realm.
He had made 300, the hyperstylized adaptation of Frank Miller’s comic book version of The Battle of Thermopylae. Sucker Punch was a videogame-like fantasy of female empowerment and/or exploitation (take your pick). And he had made the seemingly impossible-to-film Watchmen (which, as I note in my upcoming book Superheroes Smash the Box Office: A Cinema History from the Serials to 21st Century Blockbusters, remains the only sustained, faithful movie adaptation of a single superhero comic-book story). Visually, all were stunning achievements; storytelling-wise, well, you could say that the director was never one to shy away from bringing a Howitzer to a snowball fight.
Zach Snyder Made Watchmen. It Wasn’t Enough.
But by the time of his hire Marvel was only two years away from lapping Warner with The Avengers, a tentpole which would bring several characters together under one banner. Snyder had to start from scratch, with an idea for a Superman movie envisioned not by him but Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer (of the Dark Knight franchise), presumably while playing ping-pong on mushrooms.
Superhero movie aficionados, industry watchers, and comic-book nerds all know what happened after that. The MCU’s Big Bang continued to expand and the DCEU fought for a foothold on an asteroid. With its humourless and homicidal bent, 2013’s Man of Steel was the first Warner/DC/Snyder effort to polarize audiences, and its follow-up Batman V. Superman doubled-down on the alienation. (Ben Dreyfuss in Mother Jones: “Batman v Superman Is a Failure on Every Single Level”).
The brand’s downhill trajectory continued in 2016 with the release of David Ayer’s incomprehensible Suicide Squad. In 2017, Justice League fared even worse. A junkyard of ideas from Snyder and replacement director Joss Whedon, Warner’s answer to The Avengers was roundly panned and laid a Howard the Duck at the box office. That film might have spelled the end of “the Snyderverse,” as the director left the film to attend to family matters. But the table had been set.
Released earlier that year, Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman had pointed to possible course correction. Still very much a Snyder product—he had cast Gal Gadot in the title role for Justice League and contributed story ideas, and the film’s look was as devoid of color as BvS—the movie at least allowed for a drop of self-aware humour.
Warner Bros Never Knew What To Do With Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman
But where Marvel Studios was, relatively speaking, a nimble startup—even with the safety net of angel investor Disney—creaky octogenarian Warner Bros. could barely make it up the stairs. An entrenched studio hierarchy made pivoting next to impossible. And the people who ran the studio had never known what to do with the properties in the first place. After all, this was the same company that refused to make movies based Superman and Batman—properties it owned—until outside producers bought the rights and put up the cash. Even after both Superman ’78 and Batman ’89 made boatloads of money, the higher-ups at Warner made precisely one intelligent proactive decision, and that was hiring Nolan to reboot Batman.
The DCEU movies that followed have been, to put it mildly, a mixed bag. Aquaman was a hit, not because of its place in a shared universe, but despite it. The modestly budgeted Shazam!, a DCEU character in name only, was also a (minor) success.
After that, though, the biggest successes the studio could point to were non-DCEU efforts Joker and The Batman. (Although it should be noted that Snyder’s four-hour cut of Justice League, also released mid-pandemic, succeeded on its own terms — the fact that it was made at all, and became the fourth-most-streamed film on HBO Max that year.)
Released at the beginning of and mid-pandemic respectively, Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman 1984 both failed to find an audience. Though a commercial failure, James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad helped reviewers forget the earlier Suicide Squad. That alone was enough to prompt Warner to, a year later, hire Gunn (along with in-house producer Peter Safran) to reboot the universe it was finally giving up on.
Warner cancels Batgirl. Why? Maybe because it’s terrible.
Even so, the non-hits kept coming. Both Black Adam, a sort-of sequel to Shazam!, and Fury of the Gods, a direct sequel, were critical and commercial bombs. (The San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle called Black Adam “possibly the worst movie ever.” It’s not an exaggeration.)
Things were getting so bad that Warner executives began screening movies before releasing them. This innovation led to new Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav putting the kibosh on an almost-completed Batgirl. The textbook new CEO power move earned enmity from furious fanboys but undying gratitude from critics, who were left to wonder just how bad the movie was. Could it be worse than Steel? Batman and Robin? Superman 3?
Which brings us back to the latest in the DCEU, The Flash.
If early buzz was anything to go by, the solo film featuring the character Ezra Miller had debuted in Batman v Superman was going to be a hit. Alas, early buzz was nothing to go by. Whether due to the real-world reviews, multi-verse fatigue, superhero-fatigue, or Ezra Miller-headline-fatigue, audiences just are not interested. Not even two Batmans can save this DOA turkey.
As many have noted, The Flash is a lame duck, a film with multiple ties to a dead universe. It’s not even the last we’ll see from the DCEU. We still have to suffer through Blue Beetle, a modestly budgeted effort based on a character obscure even by Polka-Dot Man standards. It’s scheduled for an August 2023 release. And then, coming in December — that is, unless Zaslav watches it first — is Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom. Advance word is, keep your expectations somewhere around the depth of the Mariana Trench.
Go Into That Good Night, DCEU, Fists Flailing and Blue Lightning Blazing
And so, as Warner’s first attempt to build a universe out of some of DC’s finest sputters to a close, the time has come to say goodbye to the DCEU. It wasn’t all that much fun while it lasted, and probably even its most ardent supporters—the ones who fought for the release of “the Snyder cut” of JL—won’t be too choked up to see its cape flutter into the twilight.