Could Miller stay out of trouble, and out of the headlines, long enough for The Flash to safely enter theaters?

Ten months later, the answer appears to be yes. Miller has not only stayed out of the headlines, but the actor is nowhere to be found in the press as the film sprints toward its June 16 release date.

“It can’t be the studio telling you it’s good; your friends have to tell you it’s good,” says one insider.

Reviews: Decent but Not Great 

First reviews, on June 6, are solid, but not the type of notices received by The Dark Knight, considered the greatest film of the genre.

The Flash currently sports 72 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, beating Joker, Warners’ 2019 Oscar-winning, a $1 billion hit, which has a 69 percent score.

The studio is facing several headwinds that affect The Flash’s opening — a soft $70 million-$75 million.

Superhero movie fatigue is real, and so is the perception that these next few DC movies, including August’s Blue Beetle and December’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, are less urgent because Warners is relaunching entirely new movies, with new actors to inhabit the superhero roles, under DC Studios heads Gunn and Peter Safran. 

Some actors from the current universe could persist, and the one most likely is Xolo Maridueña, whose character Blue Beetle has close ties in the comics to Booster Gold.

Gunn and Safran plan their own Booster Gold show, and it is possible Blue Beetle could appear in it, depending on Beetle’s reception this summer.

Andy Muschietti

Warners has sidelined Miller in the press in favor of director Andy Muschietti, producer Barbara Muschietti and Supergirl actor Sasha Calle as ambassadors for the film.

Fan Events: No Questions from Press

On June 12, Miller is expected to attend the film’s premiere, a “fan event” — one where stars walk the carpet but answer no questions from journalists.

The studio previously had such hybrid events. In April 2022, it held a New York event for Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which was mired due to author J.K. Rowling, the recasting of Johnny Depp, and Miller, who was arrested in Hawaii days before the event.

Instead of touting its star, the studio has enlisted famous champions, courting celebrities for advance screenings.

Stephen King has seen it: “As a rule I don’t care a lot for superhero movies, but this one is special. It’s heartfelt, funny, and eye-popping,” he tweeted.

The studio mounted one of the more robust screening campaigns in recent memory to build buzz, with tens of thousands seeing it.

Warners has been spending heavily on spots and particularly trailers, running the latter during the NBA playoffs. Warners paid upwards of $14 million to the NBA alone, although that also included a spot for Barbie.

“They are spending huge, huge. This is a massive campaign,” says the executive familiar with these rollouts.

And if Warners can’t bank on the Flash himself to bring audiences in, it is hoping that Batman can, as well as the nostalgia factor for Michael Keaton.

Both have been heavily profiled in the campaigns, and Keaton showed up for fan event in London last weekend.

Having both Keaton and Ben Affleck back as Batman has drawn comparisons to ground trod by the successful Spider-Man: No Way Home (unfairly, as Flash was to have originally arrived in theatres before that movie).

On the flip side, moviegoers may feel like seeing a Batman movie, in the form of Robert Pattinson’s The Batman, released in 2022.

“They are not promoting The Flash as a character because they can’t,” a rival studio executive says regarding not putting too much focus on Miller.

Normally, studios would also have a big movie’s stars blanket late night talk shows, but due to the writers strike, those shows have shut down. That has been a blow to movies, but in the case of Flash, it may prove advantageous. Miller isn’t conspicuously absent from the shows, and co-stars don’t have to field awkward questions about their troubled star.

“It has hurt everyone equally” says the rival exec, “but in their case, it hurts them less.”