Blog
A Flash Movie Exists, Apparently
aka A Strategy of Loss Mitigagtion
09/27/2023
When I finally got around to watching The Flash, I was pretty much already fully aware of everything that was going to happen on screen, so I spent most of the runtime on my phone.
I would up googling certain questions the movie brought up, and I think the biggest one, and really the only question about this absolute train wreck that is worth anyone's actual time, was how did we even get here? What series of decisions and crises could possibly have this as the end result? I think I have a version of an answer, and as I haven't seen this particular answer out in the Internet anywhere, I thought I'd share it.
The movie existing at all is less of a puzzle. This movie was announced in 2013, with a 2016 release date ahead of the proposed Justice League movie. Back then this was just what EVERYONE was doing: announcing slates of connected movie franchises to try to mimic the unprecedented success of the Marvel movies. More importantly, however, they also modeled the way Marvel spent their money. Every movie would have a budget of 180-250 million dollars, and would walk away with a box office north of 700 million. It was an incredibly expensive but reliable way to turn a huge profit. The message to the rest of the film industry was simply that you could make a billion dollars if you can put down 300 million.
I would up googling certain questions the movie brought up, and I think the biggest one, and really the only question about this absolute train wreck that is worth anyone's actual time, was how did we even get here? What series of decisions and crises could possibly have this as the end result? I think I have a version of an answer, and as I haven't seen this particular answer out in the Internet anywhere, I thought I'd share it.
The movie existing at all is less of a puzzle. This movie was announced in 2013, with a 2016 release date ahead of the proposed Justice League movie. Back then this was just what EVERYONE was doing: announcing slates of connected movie franchises to try to mimic the unprecedented success of the Marvel movies. More importantly, however, they also modeled the way Marvel spent their money. Every movie would have a budget of 180-250 million dollars, and would walk away with a box office north of 700 million. It was an incredibly expensive but reliable way to turn a huge profit. The message to the rest of the film industry was simply that you could make a billion dollars if you can put down 300 million.
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It wasn't EXACTLY true, but it also wasn't exactly wrong. For all our smarmy "but you still need to tell a good story" attitude, Justice League managed to bring in 650 million on a reported 300 million budget. Yes, you also have to account for the completely insane marketing budget, which doesn't usually get reported but you can generally guess to be somewhere between 50-80% of the budget, which in this case reduces the profit to practically nothing, but it still proves the overall mechanism isn't completely broken.
This is the world the Flash came from. A world where you could just pump endless money into a movie and see a huge return… it just managed to be in production so long that the entire model has basically crumbled around it. |
Here's where my actual thought kicks in; why, in the current market, was this movie allowed to come out looking like this? Knowing what we know about the state of Warner Brothers and their current shift towards releasing as little content as possible, where they are literally choosing to not release finished movies, how did THIS manage to get a theatrical release?
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The answer, I think, is to stop thinking of Warner Brothers as a creative organization at all… and in fact, also set aside the idea that they're trying to make money. The organization is motivated, instead, by trying to mitigate loss. Remember that the current organization has no ownership at all of these projects. These checks were all written three CEOs ago. These are just massive expenditures barreling down the pipeline at them that they have to navigate.
Perhaps most crucially, Warner Brothers no longer has any faith at all in their ability to turn a profit. They are focused solely on trying to lose as little as possible. Batgirl had a budget of approximately 90 million. If it had a theatrical release, you have to expect a marketing budget of at least 45 million, although realistically it would probably be closer to almost 100% of such a small budget. Choosing not to release the movie for a 25 million tax write-off and a total sunk cost of only 65 million makes a lot more sense than to sink between 130 to 180 million, particularly when you consider that Warner Brothers has absolutely zero faith in ANY of their projects to turn any profit. |
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So how does this explain the release of The Flash? Unlike Batgirl, Warner Brothers was BURIED in reasons not to go forward with a theatrical release. Even in a complete vacuum, the whole Ezra Miller debacle should have been more than enough reason to bail on the whole thing. But you have to remember: their sole focus here is loss mitigation. This movie has been in production for very nearly a decade. That means there have been people drawing paychecks working on this thing for the full duration of multiple CEO changes. This budget was originally set up back when huge production budgets made sense, and it has to have just constantly ballooned for years. The reported budget for this thing is supposedly somewhere around $220 million. No 25 million tax write-off is going to offset that. Their only hope of mitigating this massive loss is to try to just milk it for as much box office return as they can.
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Which explains the decision to blatantly farm the fanbase with nostalgia-bait. It doesn't matter how bad it looks, how little sense it makes… just every crass, underhanded attempt to milk the nerds for that nerd-money. Sure, put Keaton's Batman in it. Grab Michael Shannon for the Snyder-purists. Dump in as much cheap, quick cg as you can. It doesn't have to be good, they don't have to like it, they just have to pay for it. Even the marketing push makes sense, from this perspective. You have to pay to get asses in seats.
The result? With a marketing budget of 80-100 million, the movie cost somewhere in the ballpark of 300-320 million. The final global box office was 268 million. In the end, they only lost maybe 40 million. Which means they succeeded. They successfully offset the bulk of the anticipated loss from this thing. It lost less money than Batgirl. |
I'm not trying to be cynical. I understand why everyone keeps talking about what the creative intention was here; They wanted to close out the DCEU, or they wanted to set up James Gunn's new DCU. I just think that at some point we have to be honest with ourselves and understand our actual role here. We are not the customers. The goal here is not to entertain us. The customer is the shareholder. We are the product being sold.
And... that's basically it. That's the Flash.
And... that's basically it. That's the Flash.