'The Flash' Cameo Turning Heads Highlights A Turbulent Production Amid A Shifting Administrative Landscape At DC

Jun 27

WARNING: The Flash Spoilers Below

The ending for The Flash has a surprising cameo appearance, but that cameo wouldn’t have happened without the changes that Warner Bros. underwent during the merger with Discovery.

Throughout the film, Ezra Miller’s Flash teams up with Michael Keaton’s Batman and Sasha Calle’s Supergirl to undo a threat that Flash had brought onto the world. During the fighting, both Batman and Supergirl are killed, with Flash having to carry on alone. Since the film featured time travel, there was always the possibility that drastic events could be undone.

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The original ending for the film that had been shot would have featured the return of both Batman and Supergirl, signifying that the actions of Flash hadn’t affected the timeline. When the merger happened in 2022, management changes throughout Warner Bros. Discovery put Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy in temporary charge of DC Studios while CEO David Zaslav hunted for a more permanent team.

As part of their running of DC, De Luca, and Abdy had their own vision for ending The Flash that involved a few cameos. Linking into the then plans for a Henry Cavill-led Superman film and the third of Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman films, Henry Cavill’s Superman and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman would have joined Supergirl and Batman on the steps of that courthouse.

Hello, World!

With that ending shot in September, October saw the announcement of the permanent overseers of DC Studios, James Gunn and Peter Safran. With some of their first moves to cancel both Superman and Wonder Woman films, that reshot ending wouldn’t make sense to keep. Instead of reverting to the original plan, a secret third reshoot happened on a single day in January. A reshoot that involved bringing back yet another Batman.

An idea joked about during production, of how many Batmen they could fit into one film, Gunn and Safran felt it would make for an interesting twist ending. And so the planning began to bring in one more for a cameo appearance. Contacting George Clooney and showing the film to him, he liked it enough to want to cameo in. Within the world of Batmen, Clooney played the most infamous of them all in 1997’s Batman & Robin, which is hailed as one of the worst superhero movies of all time.

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