The Consequences Of Boycotting A Studio

We need to talk about what it truly means to boycott a movie studio, because too many people are hitting the easy button with it.

When Ray Fisher was dropped from The Flash movie last year, after he started his push for Accountability > Entertainment, there were a lot of emotions about it from all of us. Most of us weren’t happy, many of us were outraged and some started calling for an all-out boycott of WB and The Flash movie, set to release in November 2022.

It was hardly the first time that angry fans called for a boycott of WB and DC Films over an issue, but it’s arguably the most explosive call for it because it involves racial allegations. All the details given by Fisher about his treatment since Joss Whedon took over Justice League in 2017, including a boardroom of executives saying “We can’t have an angry black man at the center of our Justice League movie,” along with the blatantly obvious whitewashing done to that film that was revealed when all the people of color were put back into it for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, right down to the tone deaf at best, bigoted at worst sentiments expressed by WB boss Ann Sarnoff, DC Films boss Walter Hamada and a representative for Geoff Johns over the course of a few weeks of massively awful PR spin from the trades after ZSJL’s release.

You get why people are angry over it, especially since Sarnoff, Hamada, and Toby Emmerich, the one who is considered the master architect of pettiness and evil action against Zack Snyder from the start, are all still employed at WB right now. The hope is that David Zaslav and the Discovery crew broom them out in the process of this new WarnerMedia-Discovery merger, but no one really knows what’s going to happen just yet.

So without knowing for certain what the future holds, fans need an outlet for their anger. Enter Andy and Barbara Muschietti’s, Flash movie, which by all accounts was set to have Cyborg be a part of the story, but now that isn’t the case after he was “dismissed” by WB, shortly after stating on Twitter that he would never work with Hamada again.

In a perfect world, we would boycott The Flash movie, it would do poorly, WB would fire everyone in charge and completely change course as a result of it, deciding to restore the SnyderVerse in full, along with Fisher’s role as Cyborg in The Flash film.

We don’t live a perfect world, though. Sorry.

That means that while you have the right and ability to boycott The Flash movie if you choose, it’s not going to work quite the way you might wish it would.

On the bright side, yes you would be denying WB your money for that film and voting emphatically against their wicked ways with respect to creatives and actors in their employ. That’ll make you feel better about yourself for at least a week.

On the other hand, someone in the general audience just took your place in line and bought your tickets to see the movie on opening weekend, and on the off chance that they didn’t, your boycott movement is so small that at best, you’ll get a quick blurb on Entertainment Tonight and maybe a paragraph in an article from the trades leading up to the film’s release, so your money wasn’t as missed as you were hoping it would be.

Let’s go further. On the off chance that your boycott movement did have a major effect and the movie did actually bomb, the first thing the studio would do wouldn’t be to change course on the entire DC Extended Universe, especially since The Flash will be the fourth of six DC Films projects set to release between August 2021 and Spring 2022. If Emmerich, Sarnoff and Hamada are still at WB by the time The Flash releases, the battle is lost already, because any major changes to the executive ranks would happen well before that time, as The Suicide Squad(August 2021), The Batman(March 2022), and Black Adam(July 2022) are all being released.

No, the first thing the studio would do is likely scrap any major plans to work with the cast and crew of the failed Flash film, indirectly pinning its underperformance on them. It would be a negative mark against the Muschiettis, who have been cinema darlings since the IT movies a few years back, Ezra Miller, who WB has remained committed to as both Barry Allen and Credence Barebone in Fantastic Beasts, and also by extension Ben Affleck, Michael Keaton, Kiersey Clemons, and the first latinx actor to be cast as Supergirl, Sasha Calle.

It’s easy to say they’ll all get paid no matter what, but the stench of that film’s failure will stay on their careers forever in Hollywood. The rest of that listed cast and crew might be able to absorb the hit, but for a newcomer like Calle, who is now getting the biggest break of her life, so big that she was in tears when Muschietti informed her of the casting, it could be devastating to her career trajectory in the long run.

Does she deserve that? Given that she has nothing to do with the Ray Fisher situation or any of WB’s transgressions against other creatives? Do the Muschiettis deserve that? Does Miller? Affleck? Keaton? This isn’t just about money after all, it’s about livelihood and how Hollywood views people’s careers. It’s a superficial industry in many ways, and the blind angst of a group of boycotters could spell doom for someone’s career without any warning at all, because like any other corporate environment, crap rolls downhill and the smaller fish are the ones who deal with it, and yes, multimillion dollar directors and actors are small fish compared to the executives and owners who sign their checks.

So you’re likely not guaranteed that this will hurt the studio at all, but you can be reasonably sure it will hurt the cast and crew of the movie, none of whom had anything to do with Fisher’s removal from it, or any of the other racial transgressions perpetrated by the studio executives.

To make matters worse, after calling people like me racist hypocrites and shills because we refuse to boycott the movie, you’ve unfortunately outed yourself as the biggest hypocrite of all, because while you were engaged in your performative activism for woke points on Twitter, you didn’t give up watching movies altogether, and the sad truth is that there are a LOT of Ray Fishers in Hollywood’s history, at ALL studios, on ALL levels. So if you’re dead set on boycotting WB over its decisively dirty laundry, then you’d better get used to a life without movies because that’s what Hollywood has been built on for decades. Now who’s the racist hypocrite?

Don’t worry, if Warner Bros. Discovery(lol) comes in and restores the SnyderVerse, which means Justice League sequels and an expansion of previously developed ideas like movies for Cyborg and Deathstroke, and an Atom series, you’ll have your built-in excuse to come back to publicly praising WB like you used to. “They atoned,” you’ll say, which is code for “they did what I wanted them to do,” which truly means your accountability only goes as far as your own personal entertainment, which is a truth that I’m sure very few of these boycott enthusiasts will readily admit as they take aim at the rest of us for not following them on their march to Hell.

Mind you, this really only applies to the vocal fans that feel like calling you a hypocrite when you decide to point out that a boycott can have unintended consequences in the event that it actually worked. You know, the kind of people that equate not buying a ticket to The Flash to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and protesting against Apartheid in South Africa? The ones who will readily call you an Uncle Tom, not even knowing where that term comes from or what it actually means, but just knowing that it applies to some form of racial hypocrisy they are blindly unaware of?

The bottom line is that if you feel that strongly about not watching The Flash movie and you choose not to do so, that’s your business and you’re not right or wrong for it. You just need to understand that the consequences of boycotting it won’t go exactly the way you think, and browbeating others into doing it by calling them hypocrites, racists, or comparing them to Donald Trump, especially when all they do is point out how unfair the blanket judgment you are making could be, isn’t a good look for you and will land you square in the Toxic Zone of the Blocked, where you belong.

If you want to do better and make more of an actual difference, do what Fisher has been doing since July of 2020 and keep being loud about the bad stuff. Failed box office returns have a myriad of logical excuses, but there’s no escaping actually being a racist or a bigot for a big company in this day and age, and we’ve already seen sweeping decisions made in the name of PR, just so the general public doesn’t brand that company as bigoted or racist in general.