THB #387: What Happened To The Flash?

This one is like peeling an onion.

After more than 25 years crunching box office numbers as a journalist and more than a decade of doing it before that for sport, I am very conscious of all the go-tos we media who are deeply interested in all this have when we try to figure out “what happened.“

At one of the major studios, there used to be a “Wheel of Blame” in the marketing department. They actually mocked one up. Marketing is always the easy thing to blame… because it is almost always the problem on opening and never the problem after opening.

But first, you have a layer of choices that are out of the marketing department’s hands, not helpful. Bad Title, Bad Star, Bad Release Date, Too Small A Spend, etc. Then there are, literally, hundreds of decisions that go into the marketing choices that are based on skill and experience… it’s an art, really. It’s not rare for there to be 100+ poster choices… dozens of takes on the trailer… demographic priorities. And there are outside influence…