Amid disappointing box office results, The Flash has some of the worst buzz we’ve seen for any recent superhero movie. Compounding the more serious concerns about Ezra Miller’s comeback, people are dunking on the film’s CGI, criticizing its use of dead actor cameos, and comparing it unfavorably to Across the Spider-Verse.
On top of all that, The Flash’s breakout meme is a scene where Ezra Miller looks like a cackling monster, smiling as he places a baby inside a microwave, while a woman screams in the background.
Partially thanks to the patchy nature of copyright takedowns during Elon Musk‘s tenure, Twitter is currently rife with pirated movie footage. But while blurry Spider-Verse camrips are being shared by fans praising their favorite details, The Flash clips are a near-universal source of mockery.
Case in point: That baby microwave scene. It’s unclear how many people realize this clip has been edited, reversing one shot so the Flash looks like he’s putting the baby into a microwave instead of taking it out. Either way though, it’s now all over Twitter and TikTok.
But if you’re wondering if this means the Flash doesn’t put a baby in a microwave in this movie… well. Actually, he still does. It just happens earlier in the same scene.
During the film’s first action sequence, the Flash uses his super-speed to save a bunch of babies who are falling from a collapsing hospital. He puts one in a microwave for protection, and when all the babies are safely back on solid ground, he takes it out again.
A nearby nurse screams in shock, and the Flash advises her to seek trauma counseling via the Justice League—noting that the League isn’t very good at this yet. A rather awkward joke, given that Ezra Miller has been accused of child endangerment IRL, and Warner Bros. faced criticism for spinning Miller’s spree of arrests and abuse allegations as a purely personal mental health crisis.
A lot of commenters seem baffled by the decision to keep this moment in the film. But to be honest, “the hero saves a baby by putting it in a microwave” is the kind of zany visual punchline that viewers would enjoy in, say, Deadpool or Suicide Squad, reflecting the scene’s intentionally Looney Tunes tone.
The problem is that people are already predisposed against both The Flash and Ezra Miller—and this clip looks memorably bizarre out of context. Especially when you’ve just witnessed several weeks of Warner Bros. marketing this as the greatest superhero movie of all time.
Given The Flash‘s fast-growing reputation as a Hollywood boondoggle, “Ezra Miller microwaves a baby” may end up being the film’s most well-known scene.
