A #1 box office opening is usually good news. Not so The Flash, the latest offering from the DC Universe, which made $55.1 million in its opening weekend, well below projections.
Given the sequence of events, The Flash’s disappointing performance was soon blamed for layoffs at TCM, a cable network that, like the DCU, is also under the umbrella of Warner Bros. Discovery. Crunching the numbers, box office watcher Luiz Fernando even determined that WBD would have lost less money on The Flash had it released it on the company’s streaming platform MAX…or just canceled its release entirely, as it infamously did with Batgirl last year. The movie’s dismal revenues are being attributed, in part, to a muted PR campaign. Given a litany of disturbing stories surrounding its star, Ezra Miller (about which V.F.’s Julie Miller reported last year), they have not done any interviews to promote it. In light of all this, a Deadline story about a court lifting a protection order against Miller actually qualifies as positive press for them.
As Marlow Stern first reported at The Daily Beast last June, a then-unnamed Massachusetts woman was granted a temporary harassment prevention order against Miller on behalf of herself and her non-binary child, who was 12 at the time. This came just a week after the parents of Tokata Iron Eyes sought a similar order, then 18, who had first met Miller when Iron Eyes was 12, and Miller was 23; “Ezra uses violence, intimidation, threat of violence, fear, paranoia, delusions, and drugs to hold sway over a young adolescent Tokata,” Iron Eyes’s parents claimed. The relevant authorities couldn’t find Miller to serve papers, about which Miller posted several mocking memes on their Instagram account before deleting it.
With regard to the Massachusetts case, the child’s mother — who has since been identified as Shannon Guin — claimed that Miller, while armed with a gun, accused Guin of being a witch and a vampire, and paid a discomfiting amount of attention to the child, including physically.
Though the order was to have expired Saturday, the Massachusetts court lifted it a day early, apparently finding convincing arguments by Miller’s lawyer, Marissa Elkins, that Miller had never spent any time with the child during which other adults were not present, and that Guin’s “false allegations” were filed as “Ezra was struggling with significant mental health issues, and was unable to come to court to defend themself against the spurious claims made by this individual.” Additionally, no criminal charges had been filed in the matter, and Guin did not appear at Friday’s hearing.
Last August, Miller apologized for the incidents involving Iron Eyes and Guin’s child and several others noted in Miller’s article, claiming “complex mental health issues” for which they had “begun ongoing treatment.” Evidently, that was sufficient for Warner Bros. executives Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy to keep The Flash on track. For whatever it’s worth, The Flash’s director Andy Muschietti has said he wouldn’t re-cast Miller for a hypothetical sequel, but then again…that may be because such a sequel is almost certainly never going to happen.
