The Flash director Andy Muschietti says the main reason that his superhero movie bombed was because too few people care about the character.

We could analyze why The Flash barely made a flicker at the box office all day long. There’s all of the controversy surrounding star Ezra Miller, it coinciding with the wave of “superhero fatigue”, the plan for it to “reset” the DCEU thus giving fans less reason to care…And you could take any or all of those stances, really. But for director Andy Muschietti, it comes down to something more direct: The Flash himself.

Appearing on Radio TU (via DC Films News), Muschietti said that while a number of the aforementioned problems nudged The Flash towards failure (although he does say he enjoyed working with Miller), he also pointed out that the character just couldn’t hit every demographic the studio wanted him to. “Years later, I started learning about other things, like how when a movie like this is made, there’s an expectation to appeal to all four quadrants of the audience. And this is a movie that, apart from everything else I mentioned, I think failed in the sense that it didn’t appeal to all four quadrants of the audience. When a $200 million movie is made, the studio expects to bring everyone, even your grandmother, to the theater. And in private conversations later on, I learned things like how a lot of people weren’t interested in the Flash as a character. Half of those four quadrants — the two female quadrants — many women didn’t care about Flash as a character.”

Andy Muschietti’s The Flash may have opened at #1, but it fell more than 70% in its second week, its total worldwide box office haul $271 million against a budget pegged upwards of $220 million. That drop points to a level of word of mouth that had no shot of ever getting grandmothers to the theater. And it didn’t exactly leave its mark on streaming, either, as it saw about 1.1 million viewers on its Max debut weekend; that’s less than what Black Adam and half of what Wonder Woman 1984 saw in their own premiere outings.

The Flash does indeed have its champions, but no doubt the studio and Muschietti are best moving forward, which they’ll be able to do as the “soft reboot” that The Flash set up kicks off this summer with James Gunn’s Superman. Also part of the Gods and Monsters chapter will be Muschietti’s own The Brave and the Bold, which we recently learned won’t be featuring Robert Pattinson as Batman.

Now far enough removed from its release, what are your thoughts on The Flash? Do you agree with Andy Muschietti’s take on why it failed?