James Gunn seems to be in no hurry to bring The Flash
into his DCU plans, and that could be because no one likes the character, and he just isn’t that popular. At least that is what Andy Muschietti
recently explained as one reason his 2023 DCEU movie featuring the character tanked at the box office. He knows the Arrowverse exists, right?
That is what many fans have been asking after the director’s comments, and he has been subjected to a fair bit of ridicule online for throwing shade at a character that managed to sustain nine seasons and several crossover events as part of The CW’s superhero franchise. Is the Flash not a character that “hits all four quadrants” as the director claims?

As per an interview on Radio Tu, Muschietti hinted at other issues, such as the personal controversies of star Ezra Miller, the heavily criticized decision to include some incredibly bad CGI representations of past DC stars, including Christopher Reeve in the movie, or the fact that the DCEU was pretty much on its knees after Warner Bros. declared it dead. However, he mainly laid the blame fully on the character. He said:

“The Flash failed, among all the other reasons, because it wasn’t a movie that appealed to all four quadrants. It failed at that. When you spend $200 million making a movie, [Warner Bros.] wants to bring even your grandmother to the theaters. I’ve found in private conversations that a lot of people just don’t care about the Flash as a character. Particularly the two female quadrants. All of that is just the wind going against the film I’ve learned.”

Everyone has their favorite superheroes, and everyone has some characters that they can quite happily live without. Comparing the Flash to Batman and Superman – in fact, comparing any DC hero to Batman and Superman – is probably a little unfair, as the appeal of the Dark Knight and Man of Steel is very rarely matched by any other hero of DC’s extensive roster of characters.
As well as the success of The Flash on TV, with Grant Gustin delivering a much-loved performance in the role of Barry Allen, James Gunn’s comic book movie career has been focused on characters that are “not as popular as Batman or Superman” but they have done pretty well for themselves. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy franchise was one of the MCU’s most consistent trilogies, and focused on characters that casual comic book fans were not familiar with at all before Gunn’s 2014 movie.

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The same could be said of both Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, which, except for Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, was made up of a rag-tag group of low-level DC characters, and of the DCU kick-off project, Creature Commandos, both of which performed well. With Muschietti attached to the DCU’s first Batman project, The Brave and the Bold, his comments have not exactly set him up well in the eyes of fans online. We will see how Muschietti’s DC future pans out in the coming years.

The Flash

Release Date

June 16, 2023

Runtime

2 hours 24 minutes

Franchise(s)

DC Extended Universe