I haven’t seen The Flash, and likely never will. Despite being a hanger-on to the superhero movie trend that has seen multiple MCU movies reaching the list of top ten highest-grossing movies of all time, the Ezra Miller-led film is one of the biggest box office bombs of all time. Some projections estimate the movie has lost Warner Bros. as much as $200 million, and it’s been criticised for its portrayal of dead actors with terrible CGI, among other flaws.
A lot of factors led to the movie’s failure, but the internet has beaten that dead horse for long enough. It made some very poor choices and did badly as a result, and that’s that. What’s worse, though, is that now Warner Bros. has decided to release the movie on the blockchain. Warner Bros. has an official NFT/Web3 branch called Warner Bros. Movieverse, and the latest addition to its meagre offerings (the 1978 Superman movie and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring) is The Flash Web3 Movie Experience.
Billed as “the first new release feature film from a major Hollywood film studio to be released on blockchain”, these NFTs include the movie in 4K Ultra HD, a voucher code for Superman comic NFTs on the DC NFT Marketplace, and “access to savings on other great DC films”. You also get a limited edition minted digital artwork, “immersive menus” featuring locations from the film, and if you pay extra for the premium edition, “curated image galleries” and “hidden digital collectibles”. None of these things sound particularly revolutionary or even interesting, especially the weird immersive menus, which seem to be just interactive sets you can navigate using your phone.
It seems silly for Warner Bros. and DC to try to mine money out of a movie that has failed so terribly by putting it on the blockchain, as if that will make it more attractive to anybody. If all this had been packaged as a DVD with digital extras, I doubt anybody would have been racing to the store to get their hands on it, but they’re likely banking on NFT hype to make this a product that is at all appealing. It’s too bad, then, that the market is already dead.
The crypto trade is rife with abuse, scams and fraud, and the mainstream has already realised this. Cryptocurrency peaked in 2021 and has been crashing ever since, with the combined value of crypto down almost two thirds and trading volumes at less than ten percent of their peak. It seems like the big corporations don’t know this, though, maybe because they’re too out of touch to realise that people are sick of hearing about NFTs. After all, loads of people bought into the hype only to lose thousands of dollars when it crashed.
This attempt to make some profit off a movie that’s already failed is laughable, especially considering it's using technology that’s already largely been rejected by the mainstream. Throwing blockchain into the mix isn’t going to change a thing about sales figures, or make people care about a movie that wasn’t all that good or interesting. It’s kind of the same thing that Ubisoft tried to do with its NFT figurines, as if people would really care more about a collectible if it had digital features. They don’t, and Warner Bros. is not going to make a pretty penny from The Flash, no matter what it does. It’s sad that it doesn’t see that.