The Flash outruns the competition at a tepid weekend box office

The troubled superhero movie opens at number one, but it's not exactly a good-looking win

By Sam Barsanti  |  June 18, 2023 | 8:39pm
Aux News Zack Snyder
The Flash outruns the competition at a tepid weekend box office
The Flash Photo: Warner Bros.

Warner Bros. had an enormously difficult time getting the Flash movie up and running, going back a decade or so to when DC tried to spin a universe out of Zack Snyder’s Man Of Steel, but now the movie is finally in theaters and all of that hard work is paying off. Unfortunately, it’s paying off lower than expectations, and then also slightly lower than those lowered expectations, with the movie pulling in $55 million this weekend in its debut—that, as we noted on Saturday, is a lower opening than Black Adam but a fair bit higher than Shazam: Fury Of The Gods, the last two live-action DC movies.

It’s also higher than this weekend’s other big debut (specifically the other big debut with a wide rollout, so don’t get your suspenders in a twist just yet Wes Anderson fans), with Pixar’s Elemental opening to only $29.5 million. We would bet that the Pixar movie would have slightly better legs than The Flash, but who knows. Everyone seemed a little iffy on Elemental before release, and this Flash movie is… this Flash movie. Either way, not great!

Third place went to Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse with $27.8 million ($280 million total after three weeks), fourth place went to Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts with $20 million (at a cool $100 million in its second week, roll out), and The Little Mermaid finished the top 5 with $11 million ($254 million after four weeks).

The Blackening did okay in its debut for a small-ish rollout, making $6 million on fewer than 2,000 screens and landing in sixth place, followed by Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, The Boogeyman, Fast X, and finally Asteroid City, which made $790,000 on only six screens—that’s an average of $131,000 or so, as compared to The Flash’s per-screen average of $13,000. That’s not bad! Don’t tell the snarky art-haters on Tiktok about it or they might make another stupid AI fad.

Here’s the full top 10 again, courtesy of Box Office Mojo.

  • The Flash
  • Elemental
  • Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse
  • Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts
  • The Little Mermaid
  • The Blackening
  • Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3
  • The Boogeyman
  • Fast X
  • Asteroid City

 
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