The Summer of Flops!

Welcome back to across the movie I’ll present by Bulwark Plus. I’m your host Sunny Munch, culture editor of the Bull I’m joined as always by Alyssa Rosenberg of the Washington Post of Peter Suiterman of Reason Magazine. Alyssa Peter, how are you today?

I’m Spiffy.

I am happy to be talking about movies with friends.

First up, in controversies and controversies, it’s the summer of flops. This weekend, the flash debuted to just fifty five point one million dollars domestically and around a hundred forty million worldwide. Elemental did even worse. Earning thirty million domestic and fifty million worldwide. While elemental has a small chance to leg out, you know, kids movies, They put up big multiples as word-of-mouth spreads, whatever.

The flash is pretty much DOA. It had bad cinema score. People did not like this movie. And it’s gonna cost Warner Brothers a lot. Meanwhile, Transformers Rise of The Beast dropped sixty seven percent this weekend for a new domestic total of almost exactly one hundred million dollars.

A worldwide gross of two hundred twenty seven million. All three of these movies cost hold on. I’m getting out my old timey adding machine calculator, cranking the the hundred million dollars. Two hundred million dollars. That’s how much these movies cost.

The flash probably actually cost more than that with all the reshoots and stuff. Meaning that they all needed to earn something like, at a minimum, six hundred million dollars worldwide to break even at the box office. In all in other words, all of these movies are probably gonna lose nine figures. Now look, box office isn’t the only source of revenue? Maybe the Flash drives some HBO, Max I’m sorry.

Max subs. And element or maybe maybe some people sign up for Disney plus for it hits that. I don’t know. Rise rise of the beast. Maybe it’s sell some toys.

I mean, it really is a two hundred million dollar toy yet. For Hasbro, and that could help them breakeven who could stay? I’m not in charge of that stuff. But studio heads have to be looking at the box office numbers and freaking out a little bit. As the entire business Hollywood has committed wholly to in the past two or three decades seems to be collapsing in front of them, not even in slow motion, like in fast motion, just like sped up motion.

Even movies that aren’t out and out flops like the Little Mermaid and Fast X, are gonna have a lot of trouble hitting, break even thanks to their outsized budget. Yes. Little mermaid has done fine domestically. It’ll probably get to around three hundred million by the end of the summer, but it’s been very soft overseas, meaning it’s it’s just not gonna recoup. It’s two hundred fifty million dollar budget.

Fastex has grossed nearly seven hundred million worldwide. In any reasonable world, seven hundred million worldwide should be like, alright, well, you know, maybe that’s not a home run, but it’s a solid triple. We did pretty good on this one. But it’s not because this movie cost I had to check to make sure that I hadn’t misremembered this. Maybe cost three hundred and forty million dollars.

Reported three hundred forty million dollars. A one third of a billion dollars. That’s another way to think.

How much of that went on, like, invest with the sleeves cut off for Mindy’s

You did see How much

of it went to Corona?

You did not see three hundred forty million dollars on the screen. I’ll just leave it at that.

They spent twenty million dollars on just, like, purple satin in which to drape Jason Mavala.

A quick box office math refresher for folks who don’t steep themselves in this stuff like I do. The production budget does not include publicity costs and box office grosses do not take into account the cut held by theaters. Right? Which is about half of the take. So a movie like Fastacts at three hundred and forty million dollars Probably really, it costs more like half a billion dollars once you include publicity, which means that the movie needs to gross about a billion dollars to break even purely from box office.

Again, there are all sorts of other revenue streams, home video, etcetera. Well, I’m not gonna I’m not gonna go out on a huge limb and say it’s definitely gonna lose money. But the point for all of these movies is the same. They’re all too gut dang expensive. They’re too expensive.

The biggest hit of the summer so far is one that not it is not the one that is gross the most, but it’s the one that has gross the most relative to his budget and at a cost of just, just a mere, one hundred million dollars. Sony is likely to clear nine figures on Spider Man Spiderverse, which will likely earn somewhere between five hundred seventy five and six hundred fifty million dollars worldwide. It hit. It’s a hit. A bonafide hit.

Alyssa, could this finally be the moment that the fever breaks and the era of blockbuster bloat comes to an end.

Please please could it. I would love that so much because I, you know, I am probably the person on this podcast who just Who’s closest to her breaking point of just being like I can’t do these anymore? Like, I just hate them. I hate them. They’re all terrible.

I literally walked out of across the spider verse with Peter and said, okay. I never need to see a Marvel movie again. Just don’t need to totally unnecessary. So, yeah, I think that I hope that this is the end of an era, but no one ever went broke, like betting on the rationality of Hollywood executives. Right?

And, you know, I don’t I don’t entirely know where all of these budgets are going. Right? It’s some of it I mean, I guess some of it is not like Vin diesel’s, you know, like lovingly detailed muscles. Some of it’s probably on COVID protocols. Some of it’s not just rotten looking CGI, but yeah.

Look, I hope that this is a turning point, but I know better than to expect. To that. Certainly, I think that I almost wonder if you might have to see a studio go under or get in just, like, really serious financial trouble for that to happen. Because it’s really hard to break the addiction in these mega hits. Right?

I think that this is a model that studios really counted on sort of having this sense of, okay, at least we know what audience is like here. We can clean up a bunch of cash here and maybe, you know, support some smaller things that we like. To a certain extent, it’s a reassuring business model for the industry. Right? It’s like, you know, if you are built on brand awareness and, like, a clear sense that audiences will keep showing up for certain things no matter what.

You have to worry less about generating a mix of hits and failures because you have a clear sense of what’s gonna do well and on what scale. And I understand our reluctance to move away from that. But even more, you know, I mean, I think we are seeing both the sort of cost of these budgets playing out at the box office this summer. But I almost wonder in some ways that the bigger story is studios having worn out audiences to a certain

extent.

Right? I mean, that’s sort of what’s unnerving from a business perspective about the sort of the decline in Marvel, the decline in the fast and furious movies. The stuff that the studios really relied on just sort of knowing what audience is like, has clearly, to a certain extent, worn out its welcome. It may be a slow decline rather than a total crash, but if the industry doesn’t know what audiences want anymore and it’s really stuck on this business model, that would be very bad.

Yeah. I mean, I Peter, I I just don’t I am not entirely sure how the studios extricate themselves from this mess because, you know, The industry is not really built to shift on a dime to something like an a twenty four business model. Right? They’re not gonna they’re not gonna be able to make five to ten million dollar movies that, you know, gross fifty or sixty million dollars if they’re lucky and and make that work. I mean, I just don’t see I I like, I’m actually I think Alissa is right that a studio is going to have to go under for this to all stop, but I don’t know what that even looks like because all the studios are tied up into other massive conglomerate.

Like Paramount is part of the whole CBS Viacom. Enterprise Universal is part of NBC. Disney is its own massive thing with its own you know, Empire Warner Brothers as part of this whole Warner Brothers discovery. I I, like, just don’t I don’t know what that actually what that would actually look like.

So all of this reminds me of possibly the most famous Maxim in the business of Hollywood, which is William Goldman’s short succinct and pretty much true for most of entertainment histories, quote, nobody knows anything. And this was this was just an observation on the business end of like we just literally have no idea what audiences are going to show up for. And this was this quote was came from the, I believe, in the the nineteen seventies, and that was just very much true back that those studios would make movies. And they kind of vaguely had a sense that if you put a big star that people liked in the movie, that more people would show up than if you didn’t. But even then, big star movies failed all the time.

Nobody knows anything. So then you got to the late seventies in the nineteen eighties and jaws and Star Wars and sort of the blockbuster era and they learned one thing. That one thing was that all else being equal sequels to successful movies perform better than non sequels. So we got a lot of sequels. Right?

We got die hard two and we got another forty eight hours. We got lethal weapons two three and four eventually. Four was pretty good.

All

of the rainbows.

Right. All the rainbows. Man, there’s all the rocking rainbow moved. Yeah. Right.

All the rocky movies. They’re still making these things. Right? So we got sequels. And then of course Marvel came along and had an additional insight which was that you can use each movie to set up not just one more sequel, but a whole universe and array of additional movies.

And the idea was that people would come to see something because they’d liked the previous thing. Right? Like that makes sense. As a viewer, if you have limited time and limited dollars, in the same way that, like, Hollywood executives are gonna invest in something they know was more likely Bulwark, everybody knows that a sequel to something you already liked is more likely to be something you’ll like than something that you don’t know anything about. Right?

It doesn’t eliminate but it reduces the amount of chance that is involved in this inherently chancy risky endeavor of both making and seeing movies. But the problem is that the movies that they are making right now that are sequels, that are spin offs, that are part of the expanded universes, that are supposed to be sure things because you liked something else, they haven’t made enough movies that people have actually really liked in a long time. They have been relying on the goodwill driven by a handful of or sort of of like let’s call them Tinder sticks. Right? Like of of the like fire starters that sparked like, oh, people really did like the rebooted fast and the furious with number four and five and six.

And then they just kept seeing them because, well, you keep taking a chance. But eventually, if you don’t make a movie that people really love, they are going to stop going to see that. And that’s true with the MCU where the quality has just radically I don’t think the movies are quite disasters for the most part, although Eternal was not very good. But the quality has really radically declined since the pandemic. If you go back and watch the pre pandemic Marvel films, they do seem a little bit formulaic, but they are better movies.

They are just better made, more entertaining, more engaging, sharper in focus. Not every single one of them. Thor two is is still not great. But like you can’t keep free writing on the fact that people liked the first Iron Man and the first Avengers and probably the the Avengers, you know, Infinity War and Endgame. But you can’t free write on that forever.

Eventually, people expect you to make something that actually wows them again. And studios have been reluctant to do so, and I say reluctant because they’re actually worried that they take chances with these properties. If they do anything that’s different, they will destroy the momentum that they have built. And so they have locked themselves into this sort of weird thing that is supposed to be a perpetual motion machine, but like the this is one of the rules of of physics is that eventually you run out of energy. Nothing just that creates Nothing creates more energy forever.

Like, you can ride that for a long time, but it doesn’t it doesn’t actually last unless you make something new that inspires and brings people back again. And that that is where Spiderverse comes in because Spider Versus is the antithesis to all of this. First of all, it cost half of what we’ve been talking about. It was an expensive movie at a hundred million dollars. But not nearly as expensive as fast x or Little mermaid.

And also, the Spiderverse movies are new. And people went to see the second Spiderverse movie because they like, they’re they’re new in style, they’re new in tone, and they also really wowed people. People loved the first one. I mean, people who don’t love superhero movies, come up to me and talk about how much they thought the first one was great. And people have mostly really, really liked the second one as well.

And because of that, they’re gonna be able to make a ton of Spiderverse movies and keep writing on that. And frankly, by the time we get to Spiderverse seven here, and Alyssa is just like, And Lord Miller haven’t been involved for forever, and it’s just like some creative team that’s been brought on just to keep making them because people go see them. This will happen to spider verse as well. But this is what’s happened to all of the franchises right now is that they haven’t been good enough, and they haven’t been good enough recently to to sustain the kind of budgets that they are now spending on these things. And related to that is that the budgets go up inherently every time you make one because for example, the the big thing that they spent money on with fast x was was just above the line talent.

Everybody knows that these movies are such surefire hits now. That they’re that if you have been in one before, you can demand a huge premium to come back because they wanna they want your face in that movie. They wanna see you on, you know, the studio wants you to be a part of it. And the studio believes that it this is as close as they have to a surefire hit. So they will spend three hundred and forty million dollars to make a movie that really should be able to be made for a hundred and sixty or a hundred and seventy five.

Could I just say the other good counter example here along Spiderverse is the John Wick franchise. Right? Which is made, again, much less expensively, the last one in the series was, I think, budgeted around a hundred million dollars. And both of them Which

was a lot more than the first one. The first one was, like, famously First first

one was about twenty. The next two were about forty, and then the fourth one is a hundred.

So what these two sort of mini franchises or I guess just franchises at this point. It’s like it’s weird to I I feel like anything that’s not, like, the DCU or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s not like about huge and sprawling mini franchise.

We’re getting Chuck, which

spin offs.

They’re building them out. Yes. We’re gonna get John Wick universe without Keon race.

Staring Bill Gibson of all people. But what both of those franchises have in common is they genuinely feel different in terms of the story they’re telling, the, you know, the world they’re building. And they look great. Right? They look wonderful.

And

Yes. Yeah. Yes. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt, but this is what I was gonna inter interrupt with before.

Which is that like, look, say what you will about these new two hundred and fifty million dollar, two hundred million dollar movies. We’ll talk about this more with the flash, I think. But they all they all almost uniformly look terrible. They look and this was this was a nice thing about Avatar the way of water. Right?

We watched the Avatar with the way It’s like, oh, this is actually what a fully realized special effects driven world can look like. Not necessarily that they all should look like even, but just that this is what’s possible. This is this is the world of the possible. And when I watch when I watch FastX, with the terrible fire CGI, and the fact that very obviously nobody was on the same set together at the same time, and it’s all stitched And when I watch Ant Man and The Wuffs, Quantum, with its kind of weird, gross, purple tint, you know, sludgy background. When I watched the little mermaid where I can’t see half the things that are supposed to be happening underwater or Bulwark Panther Wakanda Forever and it looks you know, like you’re you’re filming it in a in a sewer somewhere.

I just, like, if I’m a if I’m a normal moviegoer and I only go see two or three movies a year, and I’ve been told that this is the, you know, big, expensive blockbuster movie. And I go and it looks like garbage, like all of these movies that we have discussed look like garbage, I’m gonna stop going. I’m just gonna stop because what’s the point? And that’s why something like John Wick four is so refreshing because it does look great and bright and vibrant. Right?

Or across the Spiderverse again, big, bold colors. Like, I I almost wonder if, like, the studios just need to fire all their color timing people.

But it’s not color timing. It’s it’s a lot it’s compositing. It’s the

Of course. I’m I’m joking. I’m joking. A lot

of other yes. I understand. But, like, it’s actually it’s every layer of the visual So it

looks like sludge.

Of the visual process. And there are and it is the speed at which things are being being done. It is also frankly a hugely a result of Marvel’s demand for uniformity between films. Right? So when James Gunn makes a movie and when the guy who made Ant Man, I’m now just thinking on his when Payton Reed makes a movie.

They all kinda need to look like the same thing, and that’s crazy. And James Gunn, I think, does the best job of differentiating himself, but his movies still kinda look like Marvel movies. Again, Garden Galaxy three is the best of these so far. And even still, it’s like, this kind of just looks like a Marvel movie, a better, more fully realized version of it. And the demand for uniformity is really killing these things.

I think in addition to the the fact that there’s a lot of that their effects artists are being asked to do stuff very fast to hit deadlines that are set three years in advance, if not further. And then like the there are changes that you know, that studio heads or directors or creatives wanna make four months before the movie comes out and it’s just not possible to to do great work if you’re constantly constantly changing and constantly and, like, don’t know what you want. And you hear this all the time from Craftsman who, like, work on these these big budget movies. They like the directors who have a strong vision and know exactly what they want because that is like that tells them what to do. Rather than the directors who come in and are like, oh, I don’t know.

I guess we’ll just sorta work this out. It’s like, no. Come in knowing exactly what you want. The go to example here is Danny v Anu in Dune. Like that movie was not cheap.

That movie cost that I think about a hundred and sixty million dollars give or take. But all the reports were like it looks so much better than these two hundred and fifty and three hundred million dollar movies in part because as pretty much everybody says, Danny V knew knew exactly what that movie was going to look like before a single frame of it was shot. He went and he shot the stuff that he needed to get and then he told the effects guys, I want it to look like this. And then you know what? It looked like the thing he imagined because he’s a good director.

He had a great vision and he described it clearly to the craftspeople.

But this is this is the other thing. Right? I mean, you have to you know, you have to want to show audiences something that’s interesting. Right? I mean, Eugene Merman, the comedian, you know, gave a commencement address once, whereas this line’s like, Follow your dreams unless your dreams are stupid.

And a lot of the things that are being put on screen in these big budget movies would still look stupid or boring even if they were executed at a high degree of competence. Right? I mean, they complete just goofball, like exploding world’s visual at, you know, at the climax of the flash, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in a second. That’s a dopey idea. It looks silly because it’s executed badly, but it would look silly under pretty much any circumstances.

And You know, the the folks behind the Spiderverse movies want to do something visually distinct and interesting. You know? I mean, you know, they there is just sort of a curiosity and a playfulness going on there. Right? I mean, with the John Wiff movies, like, they just wanna make really amazing fight sequences and have an idea of what a really amazing fight sequence is.

And there is just there is none of that visual intelligence going into the overwhelming majority of these blockbusters. Like, I know you know, I do think, like, the Schneiderverse you know, GCU movies do have a consistent aesthetic. I don’t happen to like it very much or find it very convincing. But it’s not just him. Like, at least Snyder sort of knows what he wants on screen and knows what the effect is.

I don’t have to like it. I think most of the people just don’t have any ideas.

Yep.

Like, they’re not They are filmmakers who do not appear to be visual thinkers.

I’ll just exit on this note. The best action movie I saw this week was not a movie I saw in theaters, a movie I saw in Netflix. Extraction too, which costs I I think the number was sixty to seventy million dollars something like that. So it wasn’t Which

is a lot of money for streaming

—

Which is

a lot of — you’re not just

streaming film.

Which is a lot of money, but it’s not I mean, it’s not two hundred million dollars on Red Notice. Yes.

And you

know what the you know what the difference between Red Notice and extraction is? Extraction looks good. Extraction looks it looks like even though I could tell where green screen was being used and where they stitched together the long text At the very least, it looked good. It didn’t look like a big plate of garbage. And I’m I’m just tired of movies looking like a big plate of garbage.

I, like, I extraction was a perfectly fine, competent, entertaining movie that I didn’t resent looking at on a screen for two hours. And that’s like the fact that I have to qualify it that way says a lot about the state of current Blackbuster filmmaking. Alright. So what do we think? Are the budgets too damn high?

Alyssa?

The budget’s too damn high.

Peter, I think it’s the budgets are too damn high, and it’s not just that they’re too big to sort of justify what they’re making. It’s that smaller budgets actually breed creativity into the filmmaking process. Because when you are forced to try to make something good with less, you have to figure out ways to make it actually good rather than just sort of assuming that at the end you could hire you could have your effects guys crunch for an extra couple of weeks.

This is exactly right. The budgets are too high and that is leading the laziness and terrible stuff on the screen that somebody is just like, well we’ll fix it in post. Don’t fix it in post. Fix it in present. Fix it fix it on set.

Do it right the first time. That’s Sunny Bunch film executive. Alright. Make sure to swing by Bulwark for our bonus episode on Corm McCarthur who died last week at the age of eighty nine. Talk about his career and his the movies that he he inspired and all sorts of stuff.

And now on to the main event. The flash, which I’m sure Corey McCarthy did not see sadly before he died. It probably would have killed him. Alright. Spoilerers ahead.

Spoilers ahead. So buyer buyer beware. Just giving you that heads up. If you don’t want spoilers, jump out of the shower and turn off this podcast right now. I had somebody complain to me the other day.

I’m I’m talking a little bit so people can turn it off. I had somebody complain to me the other day. They’re like you should’ve put the spoiler warning at the very start because I the shower while I was listening to your podcast.

And I

was like, first off, too much information. Second off, do you have like a a sound system in your bathroom? How’s that Alright. So the flash stars as Robert Miller as Barry Allen. The flash, it picks up more or less where Zac Snyder’s, Justice League, left off.

Kind of as the flash and the rest of the justice league are tasked with saving cities and the and the sort. They gotta get people out of a hospital about to collapse. Baries putting babies in microwaves and saving them somehow. Alright. Ben Affleck’s Batman is here.

Gal Gadot swings by to burn off another movie on her contract as as Wonder Woman. It’s it’s all very entertaining. Barry is basically the Spider Man of the Justice League right. He’s the one who loves to make The Quips, he’s the Quippy one, and he has trouble balancing his heroic life where his personal problems can bury me the flash and help exonerate his dad, who was Rungly imprisoned for the murder of his mother, only if he uses the speed force to go back in time to save her, which will likely have no repercussions whatsoever so ever, on the present. Right?

Wrong. By mucking about with the timeline, Barry has in fact gone to a different part of the multiverse? Question mark? It’s helpfully illustrated in this film by this universe is Bruce Wayne who’s played by Michael Keaton. He’s back.

Tim Burton’s Batman is back except there’s no resemblance to Tim Birds Batman. Anyway, it’s a giant plate of spaghetti. Right? There’s spaghetti, And that’s what the multiverse looks like if you start messing around with things too much. Spaghetti.

There are no medic humans in this timeline, which means that the earth is vulnerable to by Zod, played again by Michael Shannon, who undoubtedly is getting the biggest paycheck of his career for the seven days he showed up on set. Unless, of course, Barry and Bruce can rescue Super woman played by Sashaikalli from a Russian prison. All of the actual plot mechanics here are needlessly complicated. Make very little sense and culminate in one of the worst most grotesque CGI spectacles I’ve ever seen, offering up rubbery versions of other Superman and flashes in Batman from throughout the multiverse. In including the Nicholas Cage one, from the Superman movie that was never produced where he fought a big spider that Kevin Smith talked about in an evening with Kevin Smith.

That’s right. This is the first movie that you will not be able to understand if you don’t know the production history of every Superman movie that did not get made. Congratulations. Alright. And as as Alyssa mentioned, it kind of leads to this visual image of giant balls of heroes of different varieties crashing into each other.

And I guess destroying the timelines I don’t know. I’m Ron Burgundy. For what it’s worth, I mostly like the flash. I actually I found it entertaining. I think Miller brings a uniquely chaotic charm to the role of Barry Allen.

He and Keaton are very funny together. There’s a genuinely thought provoking argument at the heart of it. Right? One that almost serves as a direct counter to Spider Man across the Spider Versus rejection of the so called trauma plot. Right?

The flash, the movie says, yes, heroes are defined in some real way by their trauma and the suffering gives them meaning. Yes. Barry has to kill his mom to be the literally, the movie ends with him essentially murdering his mom. Take that for however you you wanna you wanna take it. I mentioned this in my review, but having these movies come out in such close succession is a little bit like having Volcano and Dante’s peak.

Come out, you know, in back to back months. Only if Volcano made a very forceful philosophical argument that for the good of the universe, Los Angeles had to be wiped out. Had to be destroyed, wiped from the earth. Maybe it was right. Who knows?

Maybe that maybe that is what should have been done. I do find I find this movie flummoxing on a very basic level. And that level is this. Warner Brothers and DC simply refused to wind this universe down. They they refused to do Instead, they keep tacking on teasers and cameos, they’re promising continuation of Barry Allen’s adventures with Aquaman, played by Jason Mommoa, just like Black Adam and Shazam Fury of the God before it.

The studio seems desperate to salvage bits and pieces of the DC EU even as Ben Affleck and Gal Gadot and Superman who’s as played by Henry Cavl fade off into the sunset. It’s insane. It makes no sense and it’s just confusing for audiences who keep being told this universe is dead and they’re like, maybe not entirely. James Gunn out there saying, Yeah. Blue Beatles is gonna be part of my universe.

Blue Beatles. Sure. Why not? Peter, you hated this movie. Why did you hate it?

So if suffering is like a is like a good thing for you, then this movie was a great thing for me because I suffered so much Man, I hated this movie. I didn’t like any bit of it. I just wanted to walk out and leave. It was so grating so annoying. I could not stand Ezra Miller.

I could not stand him in this movie. And I’ve never had a bad reaction. I’ve never felt like, oh, Ezra Miller is is annoying before. I’ve never particularly enjoyed Ezra Miller, but I’ve never found him to be, you know, I found him to be beyond excruciating and Ezra Miller was excruciating in this film. Like, unwatchably, unpleasant on the screen.

In addition, nothing that happens

in this movie matters. Nothing is interesting.

The multiverse stuff is is so incredibly played out at this point. I mean, Spiderverse brought some new ideas to it, but the flash just wants to remake back to the future in multiverse form. You know, last week we talked about transformers rise And Transformers Res of The Beast is not a great movie, as I said, but I didn’t mind it. Because at no point in the movie, did I feel like did I feel like someone was going out of their way to annoy me and then expecting me to like it? And at every moment in this movie, I felt like the movie was was intentionally aggravating.

It has no like good ideas about what to do with its characters. Ben Affleck is there as Batman because I know contracts or something like Gal Gadot is there as you said because she’s got she has to make a certain number of wonder woman movies. Michael Keaton is there because people wanna see Michael Keaton as Batman. But what does Michael Keaton do that is in any way interesting or worthwhile? Half the stuff he does is just CGI stunt double anyway.

And when he delivers these lines, there’s callbacks to his nineties Burton films, his eighty nine and ninety two Burton film, I should say. They’re they’re half hearted. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Michael Keaton like come across as this unengaged with a performance. I did not give a crap about his stupid spaghetti explanation for the multiverse, which doesn’t make any sense. Doesn’t add to the movie.

Doesn’t help me understand anything. And in fact, is just like sort of do you guys remember Looper? And there’s a whole bit where where Bruce Willis makes the younger version of himself. And, like, they tries to like, they’re talking about, like, time travel and the, like, the paradoxes and all that. And and, like, Bruce Willis is just like, look, if I try to explain this to you, we’re just gonna be sitting here making diagrams at a plastic straws all afternoon because and it was a joke about how in movies, you always have to come up with some visual representation to explain these complicated things.

And they They did that. They just did that. They didn’t make a joke about it. They just did it except it was stupid freaking spaghetti. And I just wanna take that plate of spaghetti and throw it against my face and walk out of the theater.

Mad about this movie. I hated it.

That’s fair. That’s fair.

So like a sea, a sea of cinema story?

Alyssa. No. And the I will say the other thing that made me hate this movie so much was the way that it was advertised in advance was that the executives for Warner Brothers spent like nine months telling us that this movie that was obviously troubled was just gonna be the greatest DC movie ever and this was their argument was it’s the test better than any other movie. We really think this is the best piece. And like I walked in was like this piece of junk, this incredibly like sort of decadent rip off of other better multiverse films that has no reason to exist except you’d agreed to make a flash movie in twenty fourteen and no one had the guts to just be like we shouldn’t make this movie.

Come on.

The test scores are fascinating to me because I am maybe I’m maybe I’m a Mark. Maybe I’m a maybe I’m a total Mark. But I actually believe Warner Brothers when they say that they believed in this movie that it it it had amazing test scores that audiences were through the report that executives loved it. Because if they if they were just making all that up, they were gonna look like idiots when it came out. And they do end up looking like idiots, but I, like, I just I have a hard time believing they wouldn’t have said it without having some data to back themselves up because this movie is not playing with audiences.

And I’m curious as to listen, I’m curious to to know if you have any theories as to why it’s not playing with audiences beyond just the general badness. I mean, I wonder I wonder if part of it like, they showed it to test audiences who were so surprised by all of the guest appearances that they were like, whoa. This is amazing. We love all these member berries. And then after like nine months of advertising, with Michael Keaton and Michael Shannon and everybody else, they were like, we are we’re expecting all this.

I mean, I I’m honestly I wonder if this movie had a marketing problem in that it gave too much away before.

I think there are any one of a number of explanations. I think, you know, the fact that there is a long running and really loved Flash TV show that just wrapped up probably

didn’t help, you know, build desire

to see the character on screen. You know, I wonder if there’s a sort of snider not being there to pitch the movie, becomes a problem. And I also think it’s probably a problem that Esther Miller could not do press for this movie, and could not be allowed to do press for this movie for good reason because they are accused of a really astonishing array of ser you know, just seriously terrible behavior. And look, I think, you know, maybe maybe you’re right, Sonny, that they had data that suggested that this was in fact the greatest superhero movie of all time according to, like, some weird test audience. But I think they had to say that to justify going forward with the movie under the circumstances.

Right? I mean, this had to be a you know, this is a great and important and seismic work of art And that sort of makes up for the fact that maybe are leading actors like grooming indigenous teenagers for some weird, culty stuff under the rubric of Environmentalism. And also, they’re assaulting people in Hawaii and maybe sort of running a cult full of guns in Vermont. But the movie’s great. The movie’s great.

So that superhero movie of all time. And so, you know, I I don’t know how much desire there was for a flash movie specifically. I think part of what has driven a lot of these standalone movies, people being excited about seeing beloved characters on screen for the first time with big fancy effects. And then there’s just, like, the ick of it all. Right?

I mean, you know, and the fact that you cannot send your leading actor out on tour. And I will say this for Miller’s performance, I felt like I was not totally consumed by just the gross feeling of watching them Mona Charen? You know, Barry Allen is distinct enough from Ezra Miller’s perfsona that I was able to sort of set that to the side, if not forget it. But I I also, like Peter did not enjoy this movie. And I think for me, it’s the action sequence that actually has gotten the most praise that kind of turns me off from it.

And that’s sort of the initial sequence with, like, the baby is falling out of the building. Right? And indulge me for a second because one thing I sort of hate about movie scenes with newborns is that they never look like actual newborns. Like actual newborns are just like tiny wrinkly aliens who skin doesn’t fit quite light. Right?

And they look like little old men as opposed to, like, plump dolls. And so, you know, this movie kicks off with the sequence that’s supposed to be. That’s, like, I guess, this kind of, legit really impressive, but, you know, in which the babies don’t look real, the movie is sort of like sadistically gleeful about playing them in danger. And then the whole thing is played off as like a logistical triumph as opposed to like, these are actual children. Right?

And there is no it sort of establishes a rubbery lack of stakes across the movie. And you know, I did not think it looked substantially better than stuff anywhere else in the movie, but it also just it underlined the film’s essential glibness in a way that I found really unpleasant and that I felt like the movie never really recovered from.

It looks like garbage and there’s no emotional core One problem with this movie is that it’s not just that it doesn’t have any reason to exist at this point in the DC multi the DC expanded universe or whatever the heck it is at this point. It’s the the multiverse aspect of this feels like the whole thing is a reverse advertisement for the last ten years of movies that are about to be erased. And what I want from a movie titled The Flash is a movie about The Flash, fighting some Flash supervillains. Who wanna do crime in his city.

I couldn’t

tell you. And he and he is like, I got some superpowers. And I’m gonna try and stop them from doing some crime in my city. And that’s actually what the the flash TV show which was not always, like, deeply amazing but was light and playful and funny and gentle and and just quite fun and would have like the weather wizard as a villain of the week and it’s just like, oh, here here’s flash, fighting the weather wizard. Because that’s what Flash does, and that’s what we want from Flash.

This movie has no idea what the appeal of Flash is. It seems it it instead treats Flash as a portal for saying goodbye to a universe that nobody cared about. But if they don’t even say goodbye, that’s the that’s

the thing that drives me the craziest. If the corporate machinations behind all of this were like, we need this movie to come out and succeed, because this is the movie where we’re gonna end it all. This is it. We’re done. And we need this movie to come out, and that’s why we’re lying about the test scores, if they’re lying or whatever.

Like, I could at least understand that, but they don’t even do that. And that’s the thing that’s actually most frustrating, again. Like, I saw Shazam, fury of the gods in in theaters, even though I wasn’t reviewing it, I was just watching it to catch up for another podcast. And that movie ends with Shazam dying. Shazam dies.

He sacrifices himself. Shazam dies. And I’m like, I didn’t really like most of the movie, but I at least I kind of respected. I was like, okay, this is like an emotional way to end things send it off. And then Wonder Woman shows up in the last five minutes and brings him back to life for some reason.

And I’m just like, Why? Why are you doing? You’re trying to kill this whole universe. Anyway, You’re trying to kill it what? Just let it die.

Let it all die. So I I have a lot of real serious questions about what the is happening in the c suites over at Warner Brothers because none of it makes any sense. None of it makes any sense. And I will say Alyssa, I do kind of I I am generally very skeptical of the idea that controversies about the individuals involved with

a film, hurt that film,

or individuals, you know, like, I read it a half dozen think pieces about how Taylor Swift is in trouble because, you know, fans are mad at her boyfriend, and I’m just like, point

I broke up.

I’m just pointing at what whatever. I’m just pointing at the sold out stadiums. I’m like, she is having no issues anywhere. There’s this this has no impact in the real world. But I do think that at a certain point, very online controversies to escape the gravity of Twitter and make it into the real world.

And I think that moment is when your lead actor is screaming about his pronouns at a police officer and demanding to be taken seriously on, like, the front page of TMZ. Like, I

mean even think it’s this isn’t even a very online controversy. Right? I mean, being accused by a minor’s parents of, like, sort

of He’s accused of Omaha state crime spree. Yeah. It’s a multi a multi state child kidnapping an endangerment crime spree. Like, this is See, that

is the kind of villain. I wish the flash would try to stop.

This isn’t this extends this extends well beyond the Internet. And again, like, feel like most controversies are overstated and like we we spend a lot of time on Twitter being, you know, absorbed in our own dumb little world. But this is one thing that I do like, I think has I do think it has escaped beyond the general gravity of social media into into the real world. And I do wonder if that actually hurt the film some. I’m still not entirely sold on that, but I could I I believe that more than I believe a lot of a lot of these controversies hurt hurt the thing.

Alright. So what do we think? Thumbs up or thumbs down on the flash. Alyssa.

Thumbs down.

Peter.

Me know like

I give it a thumbs up. I give it a thumbs. I even despite all of despite all of the things I hated about it, I still found that fairly entertaining in the moment in the theater. The the one thing I really felt while watching it was man, I I just wanna watch Man of Steel again because the stuff with Zod is so much better in that movie.

Did Michael Shannon even show up to, like, to do the body of Zod in this? Because every time he shows up, so he’s got that face covering and it and his his face is sort of projected into the face covering. I think that Michael Shannon did not have any any body capture work that they only shot his face and then projected it in CG and that the that he, like, he maybe did, like, two days of work for this movie.

It’s possible. And you know what? Good for him.

I don’t know. I just assumed that they came to his house with a five million dollar check and he’s like, yeah. Sure. I’ll go hang out in front of the green screens for ten days. That’s fine.

Whatever.

Go get your money, mister Shannon.

I mean, good for him. And and I I also love the fact that Shannon got dragooned into most of the PR work for this movie. Because And Ben was like Candic notoriously gives, like, zero fucks about about PR. And he he shows up and he’s just like, you know, the character in this movie, Zod, he kinda sucks compared to Man of Steel where he had like a real motivation and, like, it was it was you know, this is this is Ezra’s movie. He’s he’s great in it.

But, you know, Zod Zod is kind of dumb and boring in this And it’s just like, well, this is what happens when when Michael Keaton is like, I’m too old for this shit. I’m not I’m not doing press on this movie, this disaster of a movie. And Ezra Miller’s in in a psychiatric ward somewhere getting Xanax pumped into him. Did you guys see him on the red carpet? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more drugged in public.

Then then he looked on the red carpet of that that movie. It’s just the whole thing is a such a mess, Scott. I’m angry.

It just yeah. It just feels gross. Right? And it’s I mean, I underst I I think, look, when the star of a movie behaves really is accused of behaving really abominably. There is a cost to a lot of other people of burying the Bulwark.

But this just this is messy. And I am we’re sort of dragging on here, but Marvel has delayed a bunch of its movies starring Jonathan Majors who has been accused of choking a romantic partner and I’m curious to see both how that story develops and what Disney is going to do. I would I would not be super psyched if I were Disney watching this and be like, It’s a problem.

Kang, soon to be some different multiversal version Kang who looks kinda like Jonathan Last but is a different person. Alright. That is it for this week’s episode. Make sure to head over to Bulwark Plus for about episode on Friday, make sure to tell your friends, strong recommendation from a friend is basically the only way to grow podcast audiences. Ben O’gar will die.

He did not love today’s episode. Please complain to me on Twitter at study bunch. I’ll convince you that it is in the best show in your podcast beef. See you guys next week.