The Hollywood Reporter called The Flash a 'crowd-pleaser.' WB buried it 90 days later.

Let's establish the financial stakeholders. Warner Bros Discovery is one of the largest single-source ad spenders in the trade-press ecosystem. THR's parent operation runs WB premiere coverage, junket access, awards-season screening packages, and cover packages on a recurring quarterly cadence. Now let's read this review: a 'thrilling, emotionally resonant chapter' for The Flash, published on embargo day, three weeks before release, written from a WB press screening attended on WB's invitation. The phrase 'one of the most entertaining DC films in years' lands in paragraph two like a pull-quote that arrived pre-bolded.

The film grossed $271M against a $200M production budget plus an estimated $150M global marketing spend. That's a confirmed loss in the $150M neighborhood — Warner Bros Discovery's second-largest theatrical wound of 2023. Within ten weeks, James Gunn confirmed publicly that Ezra Miller's Flash had no role in the new DC Universe slate. The film THR called 'a triumphant return to form' was retconned out of the franchise faster than a Snapchat story.

Here's what the review does not contain. Zero mention of the de-aged Christopher Reeve cameo that the Reeve estate publicly objected to. Zero mention of the Nicolas Cage Superman cameo that Cage himself called 'horrifying' in interviews three weeks later. One sentence — one — acknowledging that the CGI looks 'occasionally rough,' which is the most generous possible framing for water effects that genuinely looked like a PS2 cutscene. The Ezra Miller legal situation that had WB executives reportedly debating whether to release the film at all? Not in the review. Not even as a footnote.

Here's the pattern. THR's average review sentiment for major-studio tentpole releases skews positive at a rate that the audience score archives at Rotten Tomatoes do not replicate. The audience caught The Flash inside one weekend — opening at 83% on RT, falling to the 60s within ten days as word of mouth spread. By August the multiplexes were running it at one 11am show. By September it had been removed from canon. THR's review sits in the archive forever, a monument to what happens when the junket schedule and the ad-sales calendar share a Google Sheet. Sponsored by the truth.