Things aren’t looking so hot for The Flash right now, even as the speedster has successfully raced to the top of the box office. The superhero flick earned US$75 million worldwide in its opening worldwide to beat Pixar’s Elemental, which saw a global haul of US$44.5 million.
Both releases fell short of expectations, and it’s a stumble made worse by the high budget. The Flash reportedly cost more than US$200 million to make, and has been hailed “one of the greatest superhero ever made” by the executives who worked on the film. In the U.S. markets alone, the DC feature brought in US$55 million, while its Pixar counterpart collected just US$29.5 million.
The results aren’t all that surprising — in addition to the absence of traditional marketing due to the controversy surrounding lead actor Ezra Miller, The Flash came on the heels of Shazam! Fury of the Gods, one of the biggest superhero misfires in recent memory. This doesn’t bode well for DC Studios, as the movie was supposed to establish the stage for Flashpoint — a major comic book crossover story arc that radically changed the status quo for the DC Universe and led to a relaunched universe with new continuity.
“This is a weak three-day opening for a superhero [film],” says David A. Gross, who runs the movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research. “There have been similar openings that grew into big numbers,” he adds, referring to 2015’s Ant-Man, which opened to $57 million and ended with $519 million worldwide, as well as 2018’s Aquaman, which debuted to $67.4 million and finished at $1.15 billion globally. “But we do not see that here.”
Meanwhile, Elemental is the worst showing in recent times for Pixar, ranking below some of its more forgettable works, such as The Good Dinosaur (2015) and Onward (2019). Directed by Peter Sohn, it revolves around the friendship between fire element Ember and water element Wade, who discover they have more in common than meets the eye in a world that doesn’t always welcome mingling between the different elements of nature.
The subpar performance is worrying for the animation empire, especially with fellow animated feature Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse scoring big in its opening weekend with a US$208 million global box office haul. Pixar has been in a bit of a slump since the pandemic, when several of its titles were sent directly to Disney+ instead of theatres. Only time will tell if both The Flash and Elemental can bounce back at the box office in the following weeks.
Si Jia is a casual geek at heart – or as casual as someone with Sephiroth’s theme on her Spotify playlist can get. A fan of movies, games, and Japanese culture, Si Jia’s greatest weakness is the Steam Summer Sale. Or any Steam sale, really.
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