‘The Flash’: The Full Story on How the Ending Evolved Amid Several Studio Changes
Ezra Miller as The Flash in Warner Bros. Discovery’s The Flash.
After years in the making, Warner Bros. finally released the highly-anticipated DC flick The Flash over the weekend, a movie that has been cursed from its inception. After going from creative team to creative team, the script finally landed in the hands of Birds of Prey‘s Christina Hodson, with It‘s Any Muschietti assuming directing duties (and his sister Barbara, as a producer).
Spoilers ahead for The Flash
Once that combo was assembled, the film started to gain some momentum, and it finally went into production in 2021 with Ezra Miller attached to play the titular role, joined by returning cast members Michael Keaton, Ben Affleck, Jeremy Irons, and Michael Shannon, as well as new additions like Sasha Calle (Supergirl), Maribel Verdú (Nora Allen), and Ron Livingston (Henry Allen, replacing Billy Crudup due to a scheduling conflict). But that wasn’t it.
At the time, the studio wanted this to be a big crossover event that would culminate what had come before in DC-land and set them off in a new direction. Walter Hamada, who at the time was in charge of DC, was planning an adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths down the line, which The Flash would have started to pave the way for. A sequel script was commissioned from Aquaman scribe David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, featuring Keaton’s Batman and Calle’s Supergirl, and that would have directly set up Crisis.
THE FLASH
(L-R) EZRA MILLER as Barry Allen/The Flash, SASHA CALLE as Kara Zor-El/Supergirl and EZRA MILLER as Barry Allen/The Flash in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE FLASH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures/™ & © DC Comics
This was something we had assumed from various trade reports and reading between the lines of what the studio was saying at the time, including not-so-subtle hints by Jim Lee during the second DC FanDome. But now, with the movie out in theaters and the studio effectively moving on from those plans and the continuity started by Zack Snyder ten years ago, The Hollywood Reporter can confirm as much without fear from the studio that their plans have been spoiled.
As people who have watched the movie know by now, the story ends with Barry going back in time to make a very small alteration in the timeline, one that wouldn’t have saved his mom but was enough to get his father out of prison. However, this wasn’t how things were supposed to go in his universe, so by doing that, he sets up an entirely different timeline, one that doesn’t have Ben Affleck’s Batman in it. In the original script, both Michael Keaton’s Batman and Sasha Calle’s Supergirl would have met with Barry outside of that courtroom, establishing that Flash had not entirely reset the timeline as he thought. That would have set up the aforementioned sequel, Keaton as the main universe’s Batman, and also confirmed a full departure from the continuity established by Snyder.
However, big changes at the parent company ended up messing with those plans. In early 2022, the acquisition of Warner Bros. by Discovery was completed, and David Zaslav was put in charge of Warner Bros. Discovery. Over the following months, then-WB head Toby Emmerich was ousted and Hamada eventually left as well, once Zaslav decided they would be spinning DC off into its own division that would run parallel to the main studio, and started a hunt for a creative head. With Emmerich out, Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy were put in charge of the Warner Bros. Film Division, and interim overlords of DC.
Ezra Miller as The Flash in Warner Bros. Discovery’s The Flash.
By that time, The Flash was around eight months into post-production. This also coincided with the time that Dwayne Johnson and his team of Dany and Hiram García at Seven Bucks Productions tried a hostile takeover of the franchise, pitching directly to Zaslav (and not De Luca and Abdy, following the proper chain of command) a new continuity led by Johnson’s Black Adam and Henry Cavill’s Superman. They eventually got their first wish granted, having Cavill return as Superman in a post-credits scene of Black Adam, and they were very close to succeeding. A script sequel to Black Adam was also commissioned, and ideas were floated around for spin-off films for some of its characters. But that wasn’t even remotely it.
Cavill got the green light to announce his return as Superman on social media, and the studio was in the early stages of developing a Man of Steel solo sequel. In addition to filming a scene in Black Adam, De Luca and Abdy also wanted to include his character at the end of The Flash, to set things up for that solo film they were working on. In the film’s second ending, which was also filmed in reshoots in September 2022, Keaton’s Batman and Calle’s Supergirl would have stayed in, but they would have been joined outside the courthouse by Cavill’s Superman and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman.
The decision to keep Supergirl in that scene was motivated by the studio wanting to keep their options open for an eventual Supergirl return in some future project, even though they were no longer developing the Supergirl standalone film they had been in the early stages of before. Gal Gadot was also supposed to get Wonder Woman 3 down the line (Patty Jenkins was still attached to direct and was working on the script at the time), and the studio heads wanted to keep her relevant. Affleck was effectively out as Batman, so Keaton would have replaced him. This might also be where the whole confusion about who was cameoing at the end of Aquaman as Batman originated, as scenes with both Keaton and Affleck were shot and screen-tested.
Michael Keaton as Batman in Warner Bros. Discovery’s The Flash.
However, there was another regime change at the studio, as James Gunn and Peter Safran were announced as co-heads of the newly-created DC Studios, starting in their new positions on November 1, 2022. They also had their own plans, which would be the definitive ones, and they involved moving on completely from what had come before. Cavill was ousted as Superman and Wonder Woman 3 was effectively put on ice. Gunn and Safran then felt like the ending of The Flash was promising something they were never going to deliver, so they had to rethink it.
However, the duo, in collaboration with Muschietti and his team, wanted to keep the general idea of the ending — that Barry had tried a smaller fix in the timeline but the consequences still reached him in the form of creating an alternate reality where the characters were played by different people. They just had a hard time figuring out who would be playing those characters. The idea of George Clooney was brought up but quickly dismissed as a very long shot; however, Gunn and Safran decided to pursue it and showed the movie to his CAA agent, who liked it and then showed it to the actor along with the pitch.
Clooney liked the movie as well and agreed to reprise his role as Bruce Wayne in the final scene of the movie. That was done in half a day of shooting this past January under a top-secret banner. Miller had to be brought back to reshoot the film’s ending for the second time since facing public allegations and even criminal charges (to which they pleaded guilty earlier this year). According to THR, Clooney would have had several chats with Miller in between takes about facing public scrutiny and behaving in public. Sources told the trade that Miller was in “top form” that day.
Sasha Calle as Supergirl in Warner Bros. Discovery’s The Flash.
Warner Bros. kept that ending close to the chest as long as possible, but word still spread out. Semi-reliable social media scoopers like Grace Randolph tweeted out in February that a former Batman, who isn’t Keaton, would cameo in that scene. There were only really three options if that was true — Val Kilmer, George Clooney, and Christian Bale. Given Kilmer’s health conditions, it was unlikely, to say the least. So it was a toss-up between Clooney and Bale after both had said they wouldn’t be coming back to the role. Others quickly joined in to add fuel to the Clooney fire.
It should be noted, however, that some of those accounts may have had partially-wrong intel, as they thought Clooney would become the main DCU Batman. James Gunn quickly shot down those rumors on social media, but the confusion was understandable — the final scene in The Flash was previously conceived as a way to establish Keaton as the main-universe Batman going forward, and given the film’s unknown relation to Gunn and Safran’s (soft?) reboot, it’s reasonable to think that insiders may have thought Clooney was to become the Brave and the Bold Batman.
Despite those small leaks that James Gunn kind of dismissed by rejecting part of the story, Warners kept the final scene tightly under wraps until the film started to screen for the press on the week of June 4. They had to keep it out of the screening at CinemaCon, which was covered at the time but not given much thought. The post-credits scene, which wrapped up Barry’s arc by establishing that he stayed in the Clooney universe and thus chose to stay with his out-of-prison father, was also not shown.
George Clooney as Batman in Warner Bros.’s Batman and Robin.
In the end, The Flash got to the finish line pretty much how it started — by moving from creative vision to creative vision while trying to serve larger-universe plans. The studio was keen from the beginning on making this a big crossover of several DC characters, which was apparently part of the reason why they rejected the script that Ezra Miller conceived with comics writer Grant Morrison a few years ago. As Morrison revealed to ComicBook.com last year, their script, which Warners put a two-week deadline on, would have been a more intimate Flash story and not a multiversal story, something the studio just wasn’t interested in:
“Well, there had been a few versions, and as far as I remember, Ezra just wasn’t quite happy with what they were getting at the time. And Ezra had a lot of ideas; they came to me with a book of ideas. And then we worked together. It really was just the two of us. They came over here to Scotland and hung out, and we wrote this thing. I really liked it. Warner Bros. only gave us two weeks! It was cruelty, you know. It was hardcore. We had to be like the Flash to get this thing done, and they were looking for something quite different.
I got paid, and it was good fun. It didn’t do the job they were looking for, which was to franchise things and set things up, and bring other characters in. It was a Flash story, so it wasn’t where they wanted to go with multiverse and stuff. And that was the end of it.”
The Flash is currently playing in theaters worldwide, but the box office results seem to be more disappointing than the studio had anticipated. You can check out our review here.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
