Warner Bros. accused of paying for positive ‘The Flash’ reviews, which clearly had zero effect at the box office

Sifting through the wreckage of The Flash is going to be very interesting for some time to come now that the Scarlet Speedster’s solo debut has suffered the ignominy of drastically under-performing both at home and abroad during its first weekend at the box office.

There are many reasons why, that covers the entire spectrum from the incoming DCU reboot rendering it irrelevant to the backlash towards star Ezra Miller’s misdeeds, via the sentiment that perhaps offering so many advance previews and free screenings weeks ahead of its release wasn’t the smartest way of enticing everybody else to part with their hard-earned cash once it became clear the movie was nowhere near as good as the world had been repeatedly told.

Adding another morbidly hilarious wrinkle onto the situation, claims are being made on social media that Warner Bros. was allegedly paying critics and influencers in China to post positive reviews of The Flash, which – even if true – turned out to be for nothing when it flopped in the country anyway.

You couldn’t really make it up at this stage, which is damning in and of itself when The Flash has only been playing on the big screen for a matter of days, but the evidence is mounting up in rapid succession that there isn’t going to be any other outcome than financial disaster for a $200 million epic that spent a decade in development, cycled through countless writers and directors, and reshot its ending three times.

That’s a lot of effort for so little reward, but that looks to be The Flash‘s reputation in a nutshell.