The Flash just made movie history (in the worst kind of way)

The Flash experienced a major decline at this week’s box office, making DCEU history for all the wrong reasons. 

The Scarlet Speedster is slowing down in his box office race. The long-gestating DC Extended Universe movie The Flash was finally released to movie theaters worldwide last week, but it hasn’t produced box office numbers worthy of the iconic DC hero or the big-budget DCEU franchise.

There was a lot of hype leading up to the movie, with DC Studios planning to use it to relaunch the DC Universe, dropping elements from the prior DC Extended Universe that they want to distance themselves from and maintaining those that they deemed successful.

That’s where The Flash was supposed to come in, as the film saw the titular hero reset the timeline in a bid to save his mother, inadvertently changing elements along the way.

Unfortunately, as reported by The Direct, it wasn’t the success that Warner Bros. Discovery was hoping for.

The Flash makes DC history for the wrong reasons

After a disappointing domestic opening of $55 million, The Flash‘s second weekend saw huge drop of 72.5%, with the film bringing in just $15.3 million. Yes, those numbers aren’t great for a movie of this magnitude, but it’s the percentage drop-off that makes it so much worse.

As revealed by box office expert Luiz Fernando on Twitter, that 72.5% drop for its second weekend makes The Flash the DC movie with the biggest second-weekend decline in movie history. That record was previously held by 2021’s The Suicide Squad, which gets something of a pass given that the movie was released during the pandemic and was also released on streaming service HBO Max simultaneously.

What makes matters worse is that this is the third-worst drop for a second-weekend ever for a superhero movie, with just Morbius and Steel beating it out at the top two spots, with a 73% and 78% drop-off respectively (Dark Phoenix  is just below The Flash with a 71.5% drop-off).

Now, as I’m sure you’ve noticed already, those are critically-reviled movies that there wasn’t much interest in from general audiences, so to say this is a disastrous blow for The Flash – the movie that is supposed to relaunch the DC Universe – would be an understatement.

Irrespective of that, The Flash will be looked at as art of the old DCEU guard, so the DCU reset will continue. That being said, after the underperformance of Black Adam and the box office failures of Shazam! Fury of the Gods, it’s going to take a lot of work on DC Studios’ part to rebuild trust with general audiences and DC fans alike.

The Flash is currently playing in movie theaters across the globe.