‘The Flash’ Director Thinks Movie Failed Because Women Don’t Care About The Flash, A Character That Was Watched By Millions Of Women On The CW

the flash ezra miller movie

Director Andy Muschietti has offered up his thoughts on why The Flash movie wasn’t a hit in a new interview. And the bit the internet is picking up and rolling with is that he doesn’t think that people – women in particular — care about The Flash. This despite the TV version of the character running for nine seasons, successfully, with a significant female audience on The CW.

In the interview with Radio Tu’s “La Baulera del Coso” show, via Variety, Muschietti lamented that the big budget DCEU flop wasn’t something that appealed to all audiences. “The Flash failed, among all the other reasons, because it wasn’t a movie that appealed to all four quadrants. It failed at that,” said Muschietti. “When you spend $200 million making a movie, [Warner Bros.] wants to bring even your grandmother to the theaters.”

Muschietti continued, noting that it wasn’t just grandmothers who didn’t want to see the movie. It was also mothers, daughters, aunts, and nieces. “I’ve found in private conversations that a lot of people just don’t care about the Flash as a character,” added Muschietti. “Particularly the two female quadrants. All of that is just the wind going against the film I’ve learned.”

Meanwhile, though demographic info isn’t generally publicly available for The CW’s The Flash, a 2015 article in USA Today about Supergirl noted that 40% of the audience for The Flash was female at the time. This was during the second season of the series, when the show was drawing an average of 4.25 million viewers per episode, which is, you know, a fair amount of people. Female people, even. Who — I’m guessing — cared about the character of The Flash.

There were in fact several other factors working against The Flash movie, not limited to star Ezra Miller’s many legal troubles and erratic behavior, the fizzling of the DCEU in favor of the DCU, and the fact that (debatable, I guess) it wasn’t a good movie.

Regardless, to give Muschietti some credit here, he is saying this is one of the factors, and he likely knows from the Warner Bros. demo research what the gender divide was. Back at opening weekend of the movie, Deadline noted that the movie was “very male-heavy” at the box office, but did not provide specific numbers. So sure, maybe women did not come out as strongly as men to see The Flash. However, that doesn’t mean that women don’t like the character. Exhibit #1? The Flash, a show that ended mere weeks before the movie hit theaters.

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