Today at the Comic-Con panel for DC, Warner Bros. revealed that their The Flash movie would be based on the 2011 comic book series Flashpoint. For those unfamiliar with the comics, which were written by Geoff Johns (who now oversees the DCEU), Flashpoint is essentially a big reset button. Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) runs so fast that he travels back in time and prevents his mother from being killed. However, thanks to The Butterfly Effect, this has major repercussions across the DC universe. The Season 3 premiere of The Flash TV series also attempted their own version of Flashpoint and bungled it horribly.
It’s unknown how closely the movie will try to copy Flashpoint, especially since they still don’t have a director, but the implications for the DCEU are huge. Rather than just giving The Flash his own movie or a standard origin story, they’re basically turning his solo feature into a film that could fundamentally change the entirety of the DCEU. Think something along the lines of X-Men: Days of Future Past but even bigger.
What’s more, the movies may have already been headed towards Flashpoint. In the scene in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice where Barry bursts through time to tell Bruce Wayne that Lois Lane is the key and that he was always right about “him” (presumably Superman), so he has to find everyone. We just assumed this was laying some groundwork for Justice League, but with that film undergoing massive reshoots, it’s possible that scene could now tie into Flashpoint.
But overall, it looks like Flashpoint could be the way to un-Snyder the DCEU. Basically, when Warner Bros. undertook this crossover universe, Snyder was the guiding vision, but now that he’s out, the studio wants to take the DCEU in a different direction. However, they don’t want to recast everything and start from scratch, so Flashpoint can give them everything they want. It can make the universe brighter, and it can even give an exit to Ben Affleck as Batman.
It’s a bold move, but it might be a necessary one if Warner Bros. is hoping to right the ship in the long term for how they plan to approach future DCEU movies.
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