The Flash ends with the Scarlet Speedster clearing his father’s name, but what Barry Allen believed would be a minor tweak to the timeline actually has major consequences. In place of Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne is a Batman the hero doesn’t recognise but fans most certainly do; George Clooney’s Caped Crusader.
You might think a moment like this was years in the making, but as The Hollywood Reporter explains, it wasn’t how The Flash was supposed to end. The first version was shot when Walter Hamada and Toby Emmerich were calling the shots at Warner Bros. and DC Films. The Flash 2 and Crisis on Infinite Earths were planned at the time, and on those courtroom steps, Barry would have been met by Michael Keaton’s Bruce and Sasha Calle’s Supergirl.
The point was to show Barry hadn’t successfully reset the timeline after all, reversing the deaths of both characters earlier in the movie in the process.
Alas, when changes were made during Discovery’s acquisition of the studio, Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy decided to head down a different route. In that ending, Keaton and Calle were joined by Henry Cavill’s Superman and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman. Even though a planned Supergirl movie had been scrapped, the idea was to leave the door open for Calle to play the character again elsewhere in the DCEU. Diana Prince, meanwhile, was there to tee up Wonder Woman 3, and the scene was shot last September.
A couple of months later, new Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav tapped James Gunn and Peter Safran to run DC Studios. They too had some notes, and with a DCU reboot on the horizon, both had concerns about teasing a future which would never materialise. They started mulling over ideas and decided to keep the basic idea of leaving Barry in something of a bind.
So, Gunn and Safran reached out to Clooney’s agent and, after he was shown the film, the actor agreed to make a cameo appearance. That was shot in January with the Batman and Robin star sharing the screen with Ezra Miller. This was the same day they met with De Luca and Abdy to discuss their multiple arrests. Miller and Clooney reportedly got on well and the former offered them some advice on handling being in the public eye.
"It’s rare that you have a movie in post-production that faces three separate regimes with three separate agendas," notes one insider. "None of them were scrapped because of ill will, just different visions."
The Flash, with its third ending, is now playing in theaters.