Whether out of a desire to simply save face with Warner Bros. or his own genuine ignorance to audiences’ criticisms, The Flash director Andy Muschietti has claimed that the reason his live-action take on The Fastest Man Alive because, simply put, women “aren’t interested” in DC’s resident speedster.
Muschietti offered this eye-brow raising reflection on his most recent film during a January 7th appearance on the La Baulera Del Coso live show, as hosted by independent Argentinian media network Radio Times TU and given by the director in promotion of his upcoming HBO IT prequel series IT: Welcome to Derry.
Per a machine translation of the interview’s auto-generated YouTube captions provided by DeepL, the Argentine native began his postmortem on the Ezra Miller-led film by admitting to his hosts, “It didn’t reach the expectations of the US box office. It was a bit of a disappointment for me.”
“I always believed in the movie,” he said. “I’m very happy with it. I think it’s my best movie so far, but a lot of factors influenced the commercial failure of the movie some of them are known, others less so.”
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To this end, Muschietti explained, “I did realize that, basically, with a movie of that size, you’re playing with a level of risk that, when the time comes, can go against you.”
“When you make a movie there are some things that you can’t control, and one of them is that when actors have a PR crisis,” he then detailed, referring to the well-documented drama surrounding the aforementioned Miller ahead of the film’s release. “It was a big blow against the film. Then things added on, like superhero genre fatigue.”
“Years later, I was finding out things like, that when a movie like this comes out, there is an expectation to bring in all four quadrants of the audience,” the director continued, referring to a Hollywood demographics standard which divides audiences up into the four distinct categories of ‘Men Over 25’, ‘Men Under 25’, ‘Men Over 25’, and ‘Men Under 25’. “When you make a $200 million dollar movie, the studio is expecting to bring even your grandmother into the cinema. And I think, in private conversations, I was later finding out things like, that a lot of people don’t care about Flash as a character.”
“Half of the four quadrants, the two female quadrants, there are a lot of women who are not interested in Flash as a character,” he concluded. “And well, these are things that were setbacks for the film.”
Given that The Flash finished its theatrical run with a world wide box office pull of just $271,433,313 against a reported $200+ million dollar budget, it’s likely that this meager result was mainly fueled by men and not women, as the former tends to be the primary audience when it comes to most comic book media.
However, while Muschietti is clearly aware of the factors that led to the film’s crashing-and-burning, it seems he’s drawing the wrong conclusion.
It’s not that women don’t like the Scarlet Speedster – After all, the hero’s solo series on The CW ran for nine seasons, and a show does not run for that long without significant support from female viewers. And hell, ask any young woman who happens to be a fan of the Young Justice cartoon series who their favorite character is and the odds are good that she’ll pick Kid Flash.
Rather, the film failed because it had literally nothing going for it outside of brand recognition and nostalgia for Michael Keaton’s Batman.
Featuring a terrible script and even worse visuals, starring an extremely controversial actor, and existing in a then-already-cancelled cinematic universe, The Flash‘s problems had nothing to do with ‘gender appeal’ and everything to do with its genuinely abysmal quality. That’s to say nothing of the fact that its central character was not only annoying in his own right, but also the worst take on the character of Barry Allen ever put to paper.
At current, Muschietti’s next project, the aforementioned Welcome to Derry, is slated to begin terrorizing residents of its titular town sometime later this year.
Meanwhile, his next superhero film, the DCU-Batman-introducing The Brave and the Bold, is currently in production.