After Shazam! Fury of the Gods bombed in theaters to go down as one of the biggest flops the superhero genre had seen in recent history, one of the major reasons behind its failure was the belief that nobody was interested in seeing a movie that had already been branded as irrelevant. In a similar vein, The Flash may be in danger of falling into the same trap.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Scarlet Speedster’s long-awaited debut was being predicted to have a chance of cracking $100 million in its domestic opening weekend, but those estimates have now been whittled down a more conservative $70+ million. However, director Andy Muschietti being confirmed to helm Batman reboot The Brave and the Bold could potentially do more harm than good.
Of course, anyone with an internet connection wasn’t surprised by the news when he’d spent so long actively not denying it anytime he was asked, but it doesn’t instill confidence in the belief James Gunn and Peter Safran are all that interested in a sequel to The Flash when they’ve recruited its director to oversee the do-over of a character who features twice over in a film that technically exists as part of the same franchise.
Will it affect The Flash‘s bottom line? Only time will tell, but a follow-up always had a question mark around it ever since Ezra Miller began seizing headlines for the wrong reasons, and it may have gotten a lot less likely now that Muschietti has thrown his lot in with an entirely different DC icon instead.