The Flash
I do not believe The Flash deserves to be one of the biggest bombs in movie history, reportedly on its way to lose $200 million, and likely finishing below movies like Black Adam or even Green Lantern for its lifetime box office. It’s a sad state of affairs when The Flash is advertising that it’s the first movie to release as an NFT on the blockchain, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.
But while I enjoyed most of the film just fine, I agree with the sentiment that the end (spoilers follow), meant to be full of DC “multiverse” cameos for no other sake than to have them, was one of the worst scenes in a superhero movie I’ve ever seen. Now with uh, the movie on the blockchain, I guess, that scene is now going viral, and being passed around so people can see how bad it is.
There are multiple problems here:
1) They picked characters that a younger-skewing DCEU Flash audience wouldn’t know at all (how many people understand the Nicolas Cage aborted Superman movie joke?).
2) They picked mostly dead actors like Christopher Reeve and George Reeves and Adam West, bringing them back to life for this monstrosity that feels more exploitative than a tribute.
3) The CGI here is terrible.
The Flash
What’s even worse is that there are so, so many other cameos they could have chosen here, if they wanted to do cameos at all, which I think is probably too meta to work anyway. The CW’s Flash series did this with its own spin on Flashpoint, using more relevant cameos, and even getting Ezra Miller’s Flash to briefly appear there.
Here? These are often dead, always bad-looking CGI monsters. There were so many other, more relevant options here. The entire cast of DC’s CW universe. Smallville. Doom Patrol. Superman and Lois. Titans. The Batman. The Dark Knight Trilogy. Green Lantern. Superman Returns. Watchmen. Non-Keaton, Non-Clooney characters from those Batman films. All featuring living actors that may have either volunteered for cameos or wouldn’t have needed to be recreated in bad CGI.
I’m sure there were options cut from this list, but using mostly 40-60 year old characters played by dead actors was absolutely the wrong call, and if this is what they ended up with, this entire concept should have been scrapped.
I think the rest of the movie is just fine, even pretty good, but this? Absolutely not.
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