Regardless of how good it turns out to be or how much money it makes at the box office, there’s a lot of people out there put off by the very idea of watching The Flash based entirely on the headline-grabbing misdeeds of star Ezra Miller.
While the actor has been seeking help for their heavily-publicized troubles, that doesn’t mean every single person left shocked by the repeated legal indiscretions of the DCU’s Barry Allen are going to be willing to forgive and forget. Not that the people involved in the movie itself share the same sentiment, though, after production designer Paul Austerberry claimed in an interview with CBC that it’s all going to be forgotten about eventually.
The crew member wasn’t exactly willing to elaborate, with his verbatim statement being nothing more than a succinct “people will forget that,” but you’d have to disagree. For one thing, social media has already been swamped with users ridiculing Austerberry’s confidence that such high-profile tales of Miller’s antics are simply going to be swept under the rug and ignored in the event of The Flash tearing it up at the box office, while even studio co-CEO James Gunn has been about as non-committal as you’d expect.
Johnny Depp slumming it in foreign-language features and Mel Gibson popping up in dozens of VOD action thrillers indicates that bad publicity very rarely yields to an uptick in career fortunes, so the jury remains entirely out on whether or not The Flash will single-handedly rehabilitate Miller’s standing not just in the eyes of audiences around the world, but Hollywood itself.
