Flash Superhero Movie Director Proves We’re Not Great at Learning from Failure

The Flash movie came out in 2023 and by box office standards, it was a flop. A story making the rounds in entertainment trade publications this week was all about comments the movie’s director Andy Muschietti made in recent interviews attempting to explain exactly why the movie failed. According to him, it performed poorly because “it wasn’t as widely appealing as everyone hoped it would be.” Not exactly a stunning insight. He goes on to say, “I’ve found in private conversations that a lot of people just don’t care about the Flash as a character.”

In case you’re not up to date on the entire big and small screen history of this DC Comics’ character, back in 2014 a new TV series focusing on the character started on The CW and was so popular it ran for nine seasons. The character in that show had a cult following of fans who (you guessed it) cared about Flash as a character. The Flash movie cast a different actor in the title role and was not linked to the TV show which also possibly alienated a group of superfans who should have been the biggest ambassadors for the movie.

So yes, it failed, and the director is probably finding his own justifications for it. The reason I found this interesting enough to share, though, is because we can all be guilty of the same thing when we work on something that falls flat. Failure can be a great thing, but only if we learn true lessons that explain why it happened. Assigning the wrong rationale for failure is the same as learning nothing at all.