The Flash and Elemental are both having crappy opening weekends

There’s a lot riding on the box office this holiday weekend: Warner Bros. has invested huge amounts of capital—both the real kind with dollar signs, and the reputational stuff—on Andy Muschietti and Ezra Miller’s The Flash, in the hopes that the superhero film will ultimately have been worth all the headaches and cash it’s cost. Meanwhile, Pixar has basically been praying that its latest, Elemental, will break the studio’s current slump, which kicked off in earnest when bosses at Disney started shoveling the company’s movies on to streaming services as blatant Disney+ bait during the pandemic lockdowns, and continued through last year’s Lightyear.

Neither of these hopes are really panning out.

Let’s take Pixar first, since it’s far more dire: The studio is now on track to have the worst opening weekend of its entire multi-decade run of films, as Variety reports that the animation giant’s latest offering is set to post numbers that we can only describe as “sub-Good-Dinosaur.” After getting mixed reviews out of Cannes, Elemental is projected to make less than $30 million this weekend, coming in at the very bottom of the company’s openings. In fact, it’s an open question whether the brand new film will even be able to open above Across The Spider-Verse, which is on its third week in theaters. Given that Pixar just went through a hefty round of layoffs, it’s looking to be grim times at the Toy Story studio.

Flash, by comparison, is doing merely kinda crappy, instead of outright disastrous: The film is currently being projected to bring in about $60 million this weekend, falling short of the studio’s hopes of a $70-$75 million opening. (There’s some hope that the Juneteenth holiday on Monday will goose those numbers a bit, but the recently instated federal holiday has yet to prove itself as a box office driver.) Those numbers are actually pretty standard for a DC film opening, in line with (if slightly lower than) what Aquaman did back in 2018, and Black Adam did last year. Of course, those films had drastically different final performances: Aquaman rode the holiday season to become the DCEU’s first billion-dollar movie, while Black Adam, uh, didn’t. (Flash’s low-for-superheroes “B” from CinemaScore suggests it’s more likely to follow the latter path than the former.)

The only real silver lining for DC Films heads James Gunn and Peter Safran is that they probably won’t be too badly blamed if Flash goes kablooey; the film’s been in development for nine years at this point, since way before they took over the studio last year, and they’ve basically been ushering it (and the last of the Snyderverse) out the door while forming their own plans for the studio.