This weekend brought two major releases to the fold — The Flash and Pixar's Elemental. Unfortunately, neither film fared very well and both had very disappointing opening weekends.

Beginning with the DC's latest, The Flash opened to just $55.1 million ($64 million over the four-day Juneteenth holiday weekend) domestically and $139 million worldwide. The DCEU (now DCU) has struggled since its early years at the box office. Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, Suicide Squad, and Wonder Woman — all of which were released in 2017 or earlier — all grossed over $100 million domestically during their opening weekends. Post-Justice League ($93.8 million), no other film in the franchise has come close to that mark. While The Flash beats out Shazam! (which had a somewhat decent run with $345 million worldwide in 2019), it still comes in behind Black Adam.

The Flash also comes in well under projects — just another one of the many superhero films to do so. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse shattered the projections, but The Flash came in well under its $115-140 million projection.

There are likely a lot of factors for this underwhelming performance by The Flash. You had the Ezra Miller situation(s), the DCEU also got reset with the arrival of James Gunn and that may have confused casual fans, and Warner Bros. also did a lot of screenings for press and public audiences. Perhaps that move was an effort to get goodwill from fans, but having that many free screenings so close to the release may have taken some of the money out of their box office.

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Pixar's Elemental grossed $29.5 million ($33,335,000 over the four-day Juneteenth holiday weekend) and $48,335,000 worldwide. The $29,5 million opening is Pixar's lowest box office opening since A Bug's Life; the studio's second film ever. There's still hope, though, as prior to the pandemic, the animation studio's lowest-grossing film, The Good Dinosaur ($123 million domestically), opened with just $39 million. Maybe Elemental can see similar legs during its run.

Elemental had a lot of things going against it beginning with its Cannes premiere. The critics there buried the film and while reviews have become kinder since then, that was a rough start.

The Flash and Elemental are in theaters now.