The Flash will be lucky to come in third at the box office this weekend
Here’s a short list of words and phrases you don’t want showing up in stories about your big, expensive superhero movie’s second week in theaters: “Catastrophic.” “More than 70 percent decline.” “Dismal.” And, of course, “Morbius-esque.”
And yet, that’s exactly the fate facing The Flash this weekend, as Friday night box office numbers have borne out early projections that speedster Barry Allen was about to race straight off a cliff in his second weekend on the market—and not one of those forgiving Looney Tunes-style cliffs that give you a minute to float in mid-air before reality comes crashing in; no, this sucker’s going down.
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Specifically, the Warner Bros. superhero movie is expected to come in a somewhat shocking third in sales this weekend, coming in behind both Pixar’s Elemental—which is holding on to audiences much better, despite a crappy opening weekend—and Sony’s Across The Spider-Verse, now in its fourth weekend. In fact, Flash might struggle to even land at third, given that Jennifer Lawrence’s new comedy No Hard Feelings is doing better than expected—and, again, Flash is doing quite a bit worse.
Specifically, Andy Muschietti’s superhero flick is (per THR) expected to bring in about $15 million this weekend, meaning it’s suffering a drop of at least 70 percent in a single week. That’s bad enough that it moved Hollywood journalist Matthew Belloni to note that The Flash is now duking it out for the ignominious title of “worst box office drop for a superhero movie this century” with, you guessed it, Sony’s Morbius. (Which dropped from $39 million to $10 million in the span of a single week when it opened to many memes, but few sold tickets, last April.)
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The one silver lining for Warner Bros.—stuck in the lousy position of having to promote a film by a previous DC Films regime that’s arrived with huge amounts of baggage from both a creative and PR point of view, and which now is putting up bricks in terms of audience retention—is that the movie is doing a bit better internationally; $99 million in its opening weekend, including $13 million from China, means the $200 million film might not actually lose money, at least.
Source: The A.V. Club
