The Flash movie is now streaming on Max a little over two months after its theatrical release. The quick turnaround from cinematic release to home viewing is an attempt by the studio to recoup some of the losses from what is widely considered a colossal failure. Conversely, the TV series The Flash was a small screen success, having run for nine seasons on The CW. So, why did the series succeed where the movie did not?
It would be easy to blame the box office failure of 2023’s The Flash on its star’s legal and personal troubles. Ezra Miller, after all, is a divisive figure at best, which is why Warner Bros. focused much of the film’s marketing on Michael Keaton’s return as Batman. Still, early box office projections predicted a stronger opening weekend, indicating that audiences were excited to see a Flash movie if the story was good enough. Instead, it fell extremely short in box office sales, with a July report indicating Warner Bros. Discovery could lose $200 million against a now reported $300 million production budget. So what was missing from The Flash movie that made the TV series of the same name more successful? The answer may lie in the way both told their respective stories.
The Flash Brought Heart and Soul to the Arrowverse from the Very Beginning
When The Flash premiered on Oct. 7, 2014 on The CW, much of the audience was already acquainted with that version of Barry Allen since he'd appeared in two episodes of Arrow the previous year. During his appearances on the network's flagship superhero show, the nerdy forensic scientist endeared himself to viewers. In the pilot episode of his solo series, Grant Gustin's Barry Allen immediately won over the audience with his awkward charm, keen intelligence and enormous heart.
From the moment viewers met Barry, they sympathized with him. Even though the childhood trauma of his mother's murder and his father's wrongful imprisonment for the crime motivated him, it didn't define him. Barry had an innate ability to make friends, and then make those friends into family. Thanks to those relationships, not only did Barry Allen become The Fastest Man Alive, he became the focal point of an enduring action-drama-procedural that was filled with heart, which is why it was one of the most successful series on the network for nine seasons.
After Barry Allen lost his parents as a child, he was taken in by his neighbor Joe West, a police detective, and raised alongside Joe's daughter Iris. Joe became like a father to him, but Iris was always something more than a sister or best friend to Barry. Beyond those close ties, however, Barry seemed otherwise isolated until he met Cisco Ramon and Caitlin Snow from S.T.A.R. Labs. Caitlin and Cisco were the first people Barry saw when he recovered from the accident that granted him superpowers. The pair would be among the first to learn about Barry's abilities, and soon they aided him in his endeavors as The Flash. Not long after, they too became part of Barry's surrogate family and established the emotional center of the show. That core kept otherwise fantastic stories grounded in real human feelings, and brought the audience back week after week and season after season.
The Flash Movie Told an Epic Sci-Fi Superhero Story, But Without Heart
Despite the critical and financial failure of 2017's Justice League, Warner Bros. still green lit a Flash movie. After all, that summer's Wonder Woman and the following year's Aquaman had both won out at the box office, so why couldn't The Flash do the same? There were, of course, many reasons, but the biggest was their version of Barry Allen. In Justice League, Ezra Miller played The Flash with an embarrassing awkwardness that bordered on an unsympathetic portrayal of autism. Both Miller and director Andy Muschietti dialed those elements up even higher and -- thanks to The Flash's time-travel/multiverse narrative -- The Flash presented two versions of Barry Allen who were far less sympathetic and a lot harder to watch.
The pre-paradox version of Barry was almost completely isolated. His only meaningful relationships were with the rest of the Justice League -- which was more about how he could contribute in a crisis than true friendship -- and with his father in prison. Even reconnecting with college crush Iris West -- which could have given the movie more of an emotional grounding -- was played mostly for laughs rather than anything resembling romance. That's not to say that there's no emotional element to the plot of the movie. In fact, Barry's feelings are a major part of what kicks off the story.
Ever since 2005's The Flash: Rebirth comic (by Geoff Johns, Ethan van Sciver, Alex Sinclair and Rob Leigh), the death of Barry Allen's mother Nora has been a part of DC canon. In the 2023 film The Flash, upon realizing that he has the ability to travel through time, Barry's first thought was that he could go back and save his mother's life. After only some minor deliberation, he did just that, and set off the confusing chain of events that could best be described as a loose adaptation of the Flashpoint event that led to The New 52 in 2011. While The Flash's sincere desire to save his mother and reclaim his lost family was the catalyst for the story, that element was all-but abandoned the moment Barry encountered a different version of his younger self.
That variant (known as Alt-Barry) was immature, less responsible and even more annoying than the previous version, leaving the audience with no one to cheer for or sympathize with, and they seemed to figure it out as word of mouth spread and doomed the movie's opening weekend. Of course, many factors contributed to The Flash’s box office failure (such as its problematic star, numerous reshoots and the collapse of the DCEU), but all of those elements combined weren’t enough to stop the studio’s hype machine or the buzz that surrounded Michael Keaton’s return to the Batcave.
The CW’s The Flash, after all, had its share of production issues, not the least of which involved a global pandemic halting production near the end of its sixth season. Still, it retained much of its audience even after some of the storytelling had grown stale. The simple truth is that Grant Gustin’s Flash had heart. He brought an emotional core to a character whose abilities are impossibly god-like, bringing him down to Earth and making him sympathetic. Miller’s Barry Allen was awkward and hard to watch, with emotional trauma that was sometimes played for inappropriate laughs. If the DCEU had taken that one cue from the Arrowverse, The Flash might have won its box office race.
The Flash (2023) movie is now streaming on Max and The Flash (2014) series is streaming on Netflix.