The wonderful thing about The Flash underperforming at the box office is that it seems like it’s making everybody happy.

People who hated the Zack Snyder era say that The Flash is bombing because it’s the last gasp of a failed cinematic universe. In the other corner, Snyder supporters say it’s because the new heads of DC Films made the movie irrelevant, by firing Henry Cavill and Gal Gadot, and shutting down that storyline.

So that’s why everybody’s so cheerful on Twitter today; we finally have something that everyone can agree on.

Of course, there are other excuses that people can make. Deadline published an article called “The Flash Falls Down with $55-M 3-Day Opening: Here’s Why“, which claims that the movie didn’t do well because the cast wasn’t available for interviews and press tours. As everyone knows, Flash star Ezra Miller spent a lot of last year harassing, assaulting and burglarizing people who uniformly took exception to their behavior, and nobody in the film wanted to spend an entire publicity season answering questions about Ezra’s claims that they’re a Messiah to Native Americans.

Also, the late night shows are off the air due to the Writers Guild strike, so that had an effect on the marketing machine as well, and the film didn’t have an “$80M-$100M-plus promotional partner campaign”, which is apparently essential.

But obviously that’s what Deadline’s going to say, because that’s a site that is almost entirely written and read by people who care about film marketing techniques. Personally, I think people were generally aware that The Flash was coming out. They just didn’t care enough to go.

The real problem is that The Flash has a plot that fills up about 65% of a regular movie, and the rest is Miller filler. It’s a story that could easily be told in a one-hour TV episode, with a very light time paradox that’s resolved just the way you’d expect it to be.

There are several surprises, but they were all revealed in the trailers — particularly Michael Keaton’s return as Batman. They were right to put focus on Keaton, because he’s the best thing in the film — he’s clearly having fun revisiting his superhero days, and that makes the audience happy too. That pleasure is mostly extra-diegetic, making you appreciate how an actor feels rather than the actual content of the film, but that appears to be standard for superhero movies now, and it’s too late to complain about it.

The biggest problem is the film’s theory of time travel, which is dramatically inert. The major plot point is Barry’s attempt to save his mother from being killed when he was a child, and the creation of a new alternative timeline in which Barry grew up with an intact family. This is default science fiction stuff that comes standard with pretty much every movie made in the last few years.

But they wanted to include Michael Keaton as Batman, taking the place of the current cinematic universe’s Ben Affleck Batman, and that change would have happened well before Barry’s intervention in his own childhood. So how do they explain Barry creating a timeline that appears to have already diverged from the prime universe?

Their answer is that time is like spaghetti, although now that I write that down, I can’t quite believe it. At one point, eccentric millionaire Bruce Wayne shows Barry two pieces of uncooked spaghetti placed next to each other, and he makes one piece branch off from the other by bending it in a different direction. This is not how time travel works, according to Bruce.

Instead, he says, putting the second piece of spaghetti crossways across the first piece of spaghetti, the change acts like a fulcrum, which affects both the past and the future of this timeline.

If you don’t understand that explanation, or you don’t know what spaghetti has to do with anything, then I’m sorry but that’s the best that I can do.

What it all boils down to is that it doesn’t really matter what the specific change was that Barry made; it’s simply the fact that he made any change at all that’s created unpredictable discrepancies all over this timeline. Basically, there was a set of superheroes that they wanted in this movie, and this “fulcrum” idea allows them to throw in anybody they want, with no logical framework.

It turns out that’s bad for the film, because it takes all the dramatic punch out of the inciting incident. The big dilemma is a tragic and disastrous change to the Superman backstory, but it doesn’t feel like that’s Barry’s fault — that’s Superman’s timeline, not Barry’s. The Flash has nothing to do with it, and there’s not even that much he can do to help.

So this is the way a world ends, I’m afraid. They opened this story ten years ago with the extremely flawed Man of Steel, and even after several attempted pivots, they never quite reached a mass audience beyond a set of fervent die-hards.

They’ve still got a couple movies coming — there’s Blue Beetle in August and another Aquaman movie in December — to drag out this last gasp of a fading dream beyond the audience’s endurance. This must be what history feels like, just the slow grind of empires rising and falling in the distance.

Next podcast episode:
Ghost Rider!

Movie list

— Danny Horn