Elemental and Spider-Verse both beat Flash at the box office yesterday

Let’s be clear, up front: Wednesday nights do not decide the fates of giant, massively budgeted blockbuster movies. Nobody looks at the performance of their ginormous superhero movie or mega-expensive rom-com musical and says, “Whew, well, at least we won Wednesday night!”

Even so, it’s probably pretty alarming to somebody at Warner Bros. to see that their brand new, very expensive superhero movie The Flash—which has now been in theaters for all of seven whole days—had already slipped to third place at the box office this Wednesday. Per THR, the Ezra Miller-starring superhero film came in behind Elemental (as lesser a performer as studio Pixar has ever put in theaters) and Sony’s Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, which is now moving into its third week in theaters, in terms of single-day receipts. Wednesday or no, that really isn’t something you like to see after spending a reported $200-plus million, and a decent amount of reputational clout, on a “tentpole” movie.

And we really are talking small-ball here, in box office terms: Spider-Verse brought in $3.8 million on Wednesday, Elemental $3.5 million, and Flash $3.1 million. Minimal differences—except that Warner Bros. was presumably hoping for some maximal gains out of a movie it’s been marketing so very, very hard. Among other things, those takings bring Spider-Verse up to $294 million total at the domestic box office, while Elemental—which, like Flash, is in its first week in theaters—is up to a measly $43.4 million. Flash itself up to $69.5 million at the domestic box office, which is where Warner Bros. projections were hoping it’d be back at the end of its first weekend, rather than several days afterward.

All of which is basically just an ominous prelude for this weekend, which will be the real test of whether Andy Muschietti’s multi-verse jaunt has, well, legs. DC Films couldn’t ask for a better opportunity to make up for lost time: The only new big release in theaters this weekend is Jennifer Lawrence’s No Hard Feelings, which is expected to do “studio comedy money,” i.e., about $10 million. (Similarly, if you’re living in fear of the latest Wes Anderson movie going wide, you’ve got worse problems than even The Flash seems to be facing.) There is, in other words, basically nothing stopping people from going to see The Flash this weekend—except, possibly, a strong desire to not go see The Flash.