The similarities between The Flash and Green Lantern have become increasingly stark since the former hit theaters, and not in a good way.
Both are $200 million DC Comics adaptations that require a massive amount of visual effects to bring their respective worlds to life, and they’ve each been struggling at the box office. However, if you take a dozen years of inflation into account, then Ezra Miller’s title hero is faring significantly worse than Ryan Reynolds’.
The Flash is set to complete its first week at the domestic box office with an estimated $72.3 million in the bank, and we’d be remiss not to point out that was the low end of its predicted three-day debut not so long ago. Back in the summer of 2011, Martin Campbell’s Green Lantern – which ended up going down as one of the biggest flops of all-time – had $71 million in the coffers.
If you adjust those numbers for inflation, though, Hal Jordan’s disastrous live-action debut would be sitting on around $96 million, which then blows The Flash clean out of the water and into the stratosphere. Reynolds has dedicated a large part of his life to trashing Green Lantern at every available opportunity, so should we expect anyone involved with The Flash to begin doing the same when the dust settles?
Probably not, at least for the time being, but the evidence continues mounting up on a daily basis that Andy Muschietti’s temporal-tampering caper is going to secure a place in the history books as one of superhero cinema’s heftiest flops.