10 Movies Doomed From The Start

It's easy to chalk up The Flash's unmitigated, history-making failure as just a testament to it being that bad, but while that isn't exactly contested, there was a lot more going on leading up to this film's release.

Like Fantastic Beasts 3, The Flash was a casualty of Ezra Miller spending much of 2022-2023 taking a blowtorch to their goodwill with general audiences. If they were in the news, chances were all but certain that it wasn't for good reasons. But if all it took for a movie to bomb was a lead actor with a bad reputation, this list would be a lot longer. 

The real silver bullet that killed this movie, turned it into the joke that it is, to the point where they had to hand out discounts for movie tickets to see it - because that doesn't reek of desperation - was the DCEU itself. In and amongst a mix of soft reboots, confusing continuity, middling releases and news of James Gunn rebooting the whole thing anyway, The Flash stood no chance of competing at the box office.

Franchise reputation sticks in the audience's minds for a long time - that's why the latest Transformers movie bombed. So when stories came out from the morbidly curious of just how bad the film truly was, those general audiences - their gut feeling reinforced - stayed the hell away.