Does The Flash make a difference in the new DC Universe?

While the flash has been in various stages of development for nearly a decade, its arrival now, at this point in DC’s cinematic history, couldn’t be more oddly timed. In October last year, while the film was in full post-production, James Gunn and Peter Safran were announced as the studio’s new co-heads.

As promised, their tenure will deliver a major overhaul of a franchise that even the most loyal fans would admit has been spotty. For each The Suicide Squad, there was one…. well, uh, suicide squad.

And, in January, Gunn and Safran unveiled “Chapter One” in their grand project, with the help of a hand-picked team of writers – Drew Goddard, Jeremy Slater, Christina Hobson, Christal Henry and Tom King – in an attempt to address “the grumpy nature of what came before us”.

Safran and Gunn unveiled ten projects, a mix of movies and TV shows, which are set to debut in 2025 Superman: Legacy.

But, for now, we have to deal with the delicate adjustment period, as DC rejects projects completed or in development – black adam, Shazam! Fury of the gods, the flash, blue beetle and finally, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. These projects are in the unenviable position of presenting themselves to a party that has already moved on.

the flash, however, gave Gunn and Safran a pretty handy workaround. His story sees Barry Allen, aka The Flash, grow desperate in his efforts to prove his father innocent of his mother’s murder.

And so he uses his powers to go beyond the speed of light and go back in time, in order to prevent his death from happening in the first place.

A problem there: playing with the order of the universe, Barry finds himself trapped in another timeline, suddenly confronted by a younger version of himself who has never suffered a loss and is not destined to acquire his powers.

All that weather shenanigans have meant that, as Gunn explained to the press during the slate presentation in January 2023, the flash now “everything resets” in the so-called DCU.

The director added, “One thing we can promise is that everything from our first draft will be canon and will be connected. We’re using actors from the past, we’re not using other actors from the past. But everything from then on will be connected and cohesive.”

However, anyone who has seen the flash, and know how it ends, might be a bit confusing as to what it actually means. If you are ready for some major spoilers – let’s unpack this idea.

This new timeline Barry finds himself on, home to his still-living, non-superhero mother, also happens to be the same where Batman is, in fact, Michael Keaton’s Batman from Tim Burton’s late 80s movies. and early 90s. How convenient.

He’s the one explaining how the Multiverse works in the DCU – one that he says is very different from your standard MCUs, Spider-Verses, or Back to the Futures. “You’ve probably seen a movie at some point,” he says, with a noticeable note of derision.

Instead of branching timelines or interlocking webs, the multiverse here is retrocausal. Change something, and you will affect both the past and the future. It functions, as Batman describes it, as a fulcrum. It’s pretty clear that this “retrocausal” line was added just to explain how on earth a 90s Batman could magically appear.

But there’s an additional visual analogy here – Batman isn’t poking pens through folded pieces of paper to illustrate his point, but is waving at a large plate of unseasoned spaghetti he’s just made. “It’s just a dice game,” he jokes.

Just as strands of pasta can cross paths randomly, so can delays, and some of them are unavoidable and unavoidable. That’s why no matter what the Barrys do, they can’t save Supergirl and Batman from dying in the battle against General Zod.

These rules are central to Barry’s emotional arc – he faces the stark lesson that some things are simply beyond our control – but mean little to the larger DCU continuity.

Ideally for Gunn and Saffron, the spaghetti model of intersecting timelines may make it easier for audiences to buy into the concept that some characters have been kept canon (Gunn’s own Suicide Squad, for example), while others aren’t. haven’t been (Ben Affleck has been pretty candid about the fact that he won’t be returning as Batman).

Because, of the flashIn Barry’s final scenes, it’s unclear exactly what timeline Barry ended up in. Everything seems back to normal, at first – there’s a note from Iris in his apartment, exactly where he left her earlier in the film, and her father’s court hearing is still scheduled for the next day.

But, as we know, Barry always reverted to a slightly altered timeline, where his painstaking rearranging of tomato boxes in the grocery store meant the security camera captured his father’s face, securing his alibi and proving that he wasn’t home when his mother was killed.

So it looks like Barry is still on a different timeline, which is why when Bruce Wayne’s car pulls up outside the courthouse, it’s not Ben Affleck’s Batman that comes out, it’s George’s Clooney, of the (somewhat) infamous batman and robin.

Barry seems to be aware of this since, in the movie’s post-credit scene, he’s seen talking to Aquaman (Jason Momoa), explaining the different Batmen from different timelines. At one point, he mentions “my timeline”, suggesting that it’s different from the one he’s currently stuck in.

So what does this mean for the future of the DCU? Well, a lot. And nothing, really.

Considering it’s highly unlikely that we’re about to be hit with an announcement that Clooney has decided to take over the cowl more permanently, it’s also fairly unlikely that Gunn’s first DCU chapter and Saffron takes place in the timeline at the End of the flash.

Instead, this “reset” idea is really just introducing the extremely flexible concept of the DCU’s multiverse – where everything can be different and everything can be the same. This is really what the new officials decide.

Isn’t that convenient?

The Flash is now out in theaters.