Right now it seems that there’s a lot of focus on DC Films, with the perspective being that everything is in complete chaos. There are new bosses in charge in James Gunn and Peter Safran and that has resulted in, it appears, big changes to what plans for the franchise otherwise were. Henry Cavill was back as Superman and then out again as Superman, it looks like Wonder Woman 3 is, at best on hold, and at worst dead in the water. Nobody knows quite what to expect from the future of DC. Except that apparently The Flash may be the most exciting DC movie since The Dark Knight.
A report in Variety makes the comparison between The Flash and The Dark Knight, not in terms of the movies themselves, but in the way that the studio is excited and believes that The Flash is going to be an absolutely massive summer hit. The Dark Knight is, when adjusted for inflation, the highest grossing DC movie ever, so putting The Dark Knight at that level is quite the statement.
The reasons for the excitement seem to be focused on the plot elements at use, and what they mean to audiences. The Flash will be a time travelling multiverse story, and based on the success of Marvel movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, fans clearly seem to like that. On top of that you have the fact that, similar to No Way Home, The Flash will bring in multiple versions of a popular movie hero, with both Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton on board to play Batman.
This is certainly great news for fans as we know what it looks like when a studio has less faith in a film. In fact, the faith that WB and DC have in the movie drive directly into the film’s biggest issue. Star Ezra Miller has been in the news a lot recently for all the wrong reasons. If this were seen as a less important movie we could have seen WB release it quietly, or in an extreme situation, not at all, as has already happened with another DC property, Batgirl.
But then the other interesting wrinkle comes back to the fact that there’s a new sheriff in town. The expectation was that The Flash would act as a sort of reboot of the DC movie universe, and while that may still be the case, it’s even less clear what that universe will look like after the reboot. James Gunn and Peter Safran clearly have big plans, but they may not mix with whatever the plan was when The Flash filmed. The word is cameos by Gal Gadot and Henry Cavill that were shot for the film have been axed, likely due to their current DC status.
