‘One of the best superhero movies ever’: can The Flash live up to the Twitter hype?

What a difference a few months makes. Talk as recently as September was that Andy Muschietti’s The Flash might be scrapped due to the legal and reputational difficulties faced by star Ezra Miller. Flash forward to the present day, and it is being called one of the greatest superhero movies of all time following a screening for press and cinema owners at Las Vegas’ CinemaCon this week.

Let’s just put that into perspective. According to the assembled geekerati (who have only been given permission to tweet at this time), this is a movie that might just be up there with The Dark Knight, the original Superman, Black Panther, Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. And it’s made not by all-conquering Marvel but Warner Bros-owned DC.

This is the studio that gave us the original Suicide Squad movie, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, all films that made even comic book fans wonder if they actually liked superhero films. It arrives with a new regime at DC Studios, led by former Marvel man James Gunn, with the promise that it will reset the DC multiverse in a way that allows us to forget everything we’ve seen before. Or at least, all the stuff Gunn doesn’t fancy moving forward with.

The Flash is loosely based on the seminal Flashpoint comic book run, which saw Barry Allen waking up in an alternate reality where Superman is a frightened weakling, Batman is Thomas Wayne (Bruce’s dad) and the Amazons and Atlanteans are destructive forces who seem to be engaged in perpetual war. While Muschietti’s film is likely to cherry-pick from its source material, we do know that Miller will play two versions of The Flash (in the comics, the second Flash was the Reverse-Flash: in the film it will be a Flash from an alternate timeline). Michael Keaton will return to the role of the caped crusader, and so will Ben Affleck, while Sasha Calle is reportedly a revelation as Kara Zor-El/Supergirl.

A new trailer, released this week with impeccable timing, shows us that the new film will see Allen “breaking the universe” and changing the past. It’s likely there will be ramifications for DC that go way beyond what we’ve yet seen in advance publicity. Frankly, this looks epic!

The wonderful thing about multiverse movies is that they are primed and ready to explain away all kinds of superhero universe bad planning (of which there has been a lot at DC since 2013’s Man of Steel ushered in the Zack Snyder era) as simply the result of clashing alternate timelines. Moreover, if the new Supergirl does end up wowing audiences, or Michael Shannon’s General Zod gets the opportunity to shake the DC foundations that he should have received a decade ago, there is ample opportunity to bring them back in future episodes. Rumour is this will be Batfleck’s final turn in the cape and cowl, but if he’s well received – well there’s no reason that has to be set in stone. Perhaps that skulking, meat-headed guy with the guns from Dawn of Justice was just a bad Bruce Wayne from another universe where everything’s back to front and audiences love to turn up in their gazillions to watch really terrible movies.

There are other reasons to be cheerful here. If the hype turns out to be true, The Flash may just present a much-needed blueprint for how to represent Batman (Batmen?) in ensemble comic book movies, a feat that nobody has ever really successfully achieved before (with the possible exception of Snyder’s director’s cut of Justice League). Now all we need is for Robert Pattinson’s dark knight to turn up, and it could be time to really get this superhero party started.