Warner Bros. hired James Gunn and Peter Safran to help steer the struggling DCEU ship. And the duo started making waves right out of the gate. They fired almost all the DCEU stars from the past few years. And they announced a new roster of DCEU movies and TV shows. Super Bowl LVII gave Warner the chance to release a new trailer for The Flash, DCEU’s highly-anticipated multiverse movie that Ezra Miller’s controversies have overshadowed.
With all that in mind, nobody would blame you for being apprehensive about The Flash. But the first trailer is quite exciting, delivering at least two interesting Batman variants and a Supergirl from the multiverse. More importantly, the trailer gives you the feeling that Warner might have what it takes to destroy the DCEU that we hate and rebuild it into something as exciting as the MCU. And The Flash might be how Gunn and Safran do it. But before we go any further, we’ll warn you that some spoilers will follow.
The first Flash trailer makes the point of the story super clear. And super simple. Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) is using his super speed to find a universe where his mother is still alive. He runs into another variant of himself, and the two will apparently be the protagonists of the story.
Messing with the multiverse will have some unexpected consequences, like the absence of metahumans in one universe. That’s the universe where Michael Keaton is Bruce Wayne/Batman. And Keaton’s voice is unmistakable from the moment the first trailer starts playing.
Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne is also in the trailer, and we’ll probably see him in action in his reality. He might be riding a bike just like Christian Bale’s Batman, although we’ll secretly wish that Bale’s Bruce Wayne also shows up in The Flash.
Also interesting is the presence of Supergirl (Sasha Calle), whom we’ll discover in The Flash. There’s no Superman in this movie. Well, we don’t expect one now that Gunn and Safran fired Henry Cavill. We do get General Zod (Michael Shannon) back, which is an excellent connection to Man of Steel.
That said, it’s unclear how the Flash and Batman can fix the multiverse problems here, and the Super Bowl trailer leaves us wondering about the bigger DCEU story. This movie was in the making before the Gunn-Safran duo took over.
While The Flash might be a great standalone superhero movie, it will be even better if it can deliver the building blocks for the DCEU future while killing off other recent DC movies in a way that makes sense.
The movie opens on June 16th, which gives us plenty of time to learn more plot details. Sadly, The Flash’s success might be directly impacted by Miller’s off-putting off-screen behavior, which continues to complicate Warner’s marketing efforts.
Meanwhile, you can watch The Flash Super Bowl trailer in full below and appreciate all the fantastic cameos that will make you hope there’s a great future ahead for the DCEU.
