For a movie centered on the Fastest Man Alive, it’s ironic how long it’s taken for The Flash to actually get off the ground. Nevertheless, Warner Bros is still moving ahead with spotlighting Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen in his own movie, with IT’s Andy Muschietti now directing and Birds of Prey’s Christina Hodson writing the script.
So what can we expect from their version of The Flash? Apparently an adaptation of the 2011 storyline Flashpoint, which had previously been in the cards under different creative leadership. Andy Muschietti recently said:
[The movie will be a] different version of Flashpoint than you’re expecting.
The filmmaker dropped this information while speaking with That Hashtag Show after moderating a panel for the Kristen Stewart-led film Underwater. Andy Muschietti also mentioned that he’ll begin working on The Flash this year, which makes sense as the movie is currently scheduled to come out in summer 2022.
For those unfamiliar with Flashpoint, it was a crossover event that saw the main DC universe timeline being drastically altered. The core story followed Barry Allen awakening in this changed reality without his super speed and being the only one aware of how things used to be. The events of Flashpoint led to the New 52 relaunch, which reset most of the DC continuity.
Flashpoint has previously been adapted into an animated movie (2013’s Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox), and elements of it were incorporated incorporated into Season 3 of The Flash TV series. Then in 2017, it was announced that The Flash movie, which had already been in development for several years, would be a Flashpoint adaptation.
However, by spring 2018, a few months after Game Night duo John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein signed on to direct the Scarlet Speedster’s solo feature, it was reported that the project was no longer being called Flashpoint. Following Daley and Goldstein’s departure, there was no more mention of Flashpoint, indicating that The Flash would embark down a different narrative path.
Now it sounds like the Flashpoint train is rolling again under Andy Muschietti and Christina Hodson’s guidance, though if you’re expecting a relatively faithful adaptation of the storyline, think again. We’ll have to wait and see what Muschitti means by “different,” though I imagine that at the very least, time travel will still be involved given not just its importance to the original Flashpoint story, but how it’s frequently used in the overall Flash mythology.
When we last saw Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen in Justice League, he had just gotten a job at the Central City Police Department and was much more confident in his role as a superhero compared to before the tussles with Steppenwolf and his Parademon army. By the time The Flash comes out, it’ll have been about four and a half years since Justice League’s release, but it’s unclear how much time will have passed for Barry.
I’ll also be curious to see if The Flash’s version of Flashpoint, assuming time travel does factor in, will be used to explain why the DC Extended Universe isn’t as interconnected as it once was. Naturally when Flashpoint was first announced, plenty of fans speculated on how the movie could alter the DCEU framework, but with Warner Bros now taking a more standalone and filmmaker-centric approach with the DC movies, this Flashpoint adaptation could explain the changes in this fictional reality.
In any case, The Flash is still scheduled to race into theaters on July 1, 2022. Don’t forget to look through our DC movies guide to learn what else this superhero franchise has coming down the pipeline.
