It’s still a ways away, but the feature film take on The Flash is something we’re thinking a lot about.
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Part of it is just the oddity of it: it’s pretty rare to have a live-action movie and a live-action TV series based on the same property come out at the same time. We kind of had it with Smallville, but…not really, since there was the whole “no tights, no flights” thing.
In the next couple of years, though, DC is doing a bunch of these things. Supergirl will introduce a new take on Superman just months after his last big-screen outing and about a year before his next. Suicide Squad drew on characters recently seen on Arrow. But those were supporting characters.
The Flash will take one of the most popular and acclaimed superhero shows of all time and attempt to one-up it with a feature film while the show is going on.So it has us thinking: What can the filmmakers do to make a really good movie that stands apart from the show, allowing fans to enjoy both and minimizing the inevitable comparisons between the two?
So…what do we want to see in Rick Famuyiwa’s take on Barry Allen? We’ve got some ideas…!
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A SIMPLER COSTUME
I actually don’t have any problem with Ezra Miller’s costume as The Flash, but it does seem…unwieldy. From a storytelling perspective, it seems like Barry would want to simplify.
There’s no reason he needs to be that decked out ALL the time, especially once he learns to interact with the Speed Force a little better.
And if deconstructing and then killing Superman, all while making Batman seem like a crazy person, was all part of a master plan by Zack Snyder et. al. to develop the characters to “where they needed to be,” we can certainly get a version of Barry who, by the end of the issue, maybe doesn’t need to wear a costume with more pieces than there are bones in the human body.
The one that we see in the movie just seems really impractical for Barry’s skillset, and while I appreciate the explanation offered at the Justice League set visits that it’s something to help him overcome friction and the like, it seems like moving at the speeds he moves, something with a million seams and a ton of little pieces would be an even bigger impediment.
WHAT IS THE SPEED FORCE?
We’ve seen that there is a lightning-and-lighting effect whenever Barry uses his powers. Most fans have supposed that phenomenon has something to do with the Speed Force, an energy field from which Barry and other speedsters in the DC Universe draw their power.
In the TV show, we recently got our first real look at the Speed Force in “The Runaway Dinosaur,” an episode of the series directed by Kevin Smith. But we still haven’t got anything like an explanation as to exactly what it is, or how it works.
Since it appears to be much more actively a part of Miller’s Flash, it seems like a little Cliff’s Notes version of what the Speed Force is and how it does what it does in the DC Extended Universe wouldn’t be uncalled for.
BARRY AND IRIS
On TV’s The Flash, I don’t ship anybody. I assume that Barry and Iris will end up together, but I understand that the nature of serialized TV entertainment is that those things will happen when the story demands them, not when the audience does.
In movies, it’s a little different. Each film has to stand on its own as a satisfying whole, even if it’s part of a series, since it will be years before the next installment hits (if it does).
So I want to see significant movement in the relationship between the two leads in the course of the first film.
SKIP THE PARENTS
Barry Allen, for years, was not one of the seemingly never-ending line of superheroes whose lives were shaped by tragedy.
When The Flash: Rebirth came out years ago, Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver “corrected” that issue and gave Barry a tragic parental backstory — one that has been a major driving force in his solo title and on The Flash TV show ever since.
I’m not a hardcore comics purist, though, and the story has served the TV show well. But since we’ve all seen that play out, I’d love for part of The Flash‘s purported lightness and optimism to be a lack of the whole “my dad got convicted for killing my mom” thing.
And frankly, it’s for the best. We’ll have plenty of daddy issues with Batman and Cyborg on the team. There’s no real need for Ezra Miller to be retreading ground Grant Gustin has already super-speed run over.
SOMETHING NEW AND DIFFERENT
This might be kind of a cop-out answer, in that it’s so general as to mean very little…but I want to see something different from The Flash when he hits the big screen. We’ve already got a context for small-screen Barry Allen/The Flash, and he’s pretty great. I think Ezra Miller’s big-screen version can be great, too — but it needs to carve out an identify for itself that’s distinct enough that it doesn’t invite constant comparisons. Nobody wins if Warner Bros. inadvertently creates a Hal Jordan/Kyle Rayner scenario where fans are bickering amongst themselves about which take on Barry Allen is better.
The best way to avoid that is to create a character who’s cool, fun, and all the other things Barry is supposed to be — but in a totally different way than Grant Gustin’s version is, so that there’s less overlap.
HONORABLE MENTION: THE MULTIVERSE
This flies in the face of a lot of what I’ve said here: I want a version of The Flash on the big screen that’s differentiated from the TV version as much as possible while still being recognizably Barry Allen. That increases the odds that between the two, most or all of the really important stuff from the comic book source material will be touched on.
An exception? The multiverse. It’s a big, big part of The CW’s The Flash, and because of that — not in spite of it — I’d like to see it used (or at least teased) in the movie.
Really, how cool would it be if they either explicitly or implicitly established that while they’re not in the same universe and likely will never cross over, the movies and TV series occupy the same DC multiverse?
