How the Snyder Cut Can Tie Batman ’89 to the Arrowverse (If You Want It To)

With the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, fans got to see a much deeper version of Barry Allen’s (Ezra Miller) story. Along the way, we get to see him interact much more with the Speed Force, and tease some of what we will see when The Flash — the movie from It director Andy Muschietti — his theaters in 2022. But what is interesting is that the arrival of Darkseid — and the fact that Barry now knows his name — provides us with a fun, silly new fan theory to tie the events of Zack Snyder’s Justice League to the 2019-2020 CW crossover event “Crisis on Infinite Earths” and the rest of the Arrowverse.

It starts with the basics: back in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Barry Allen was seen traveling through time (and the multiverse?) to warn Batman (Bruce Wayne) about the thread of Anti-Life, and what would happen if Darkseid were to find a way to get Superman in his thrall. So…what if he managed to find other worlds, and other heroes, to warn about it?

Well, years ago, we found something on the Supergirl set that was just a fun, silly Easter egg…but with Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and the appearance of Michael Keaton’s Batman in the upcoming The Flash movie, it now feels like something that could be used to tie together various properties within the multiverse that Steppenwolf name-drops in the new movie. So let’s take a little stroll down memory lane…!

There’s a bit of graffiti written in Sharpie marker on one of the hallway walls in the bar. It’s small and pretty hard to read — intentionally — likely indicative of set decoration that’s not really meant to be seen by the average viewer.

From this photo, you can tell from that exactly how hard it would be to see on TV, especially if there were actually people in the shot. or it was from far away, but close up, it’s impossible not to see that the message here says “Darkseid is coming.” This, of course, is the warning that The Flash was trying to give Batman…even if he wasn’t exactly clear on it.

“Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?” asks another piece of Sharpie-written graffiti on the hallway wall.

Like the Darkseid message, it’s likely something that nobody could actually see on screen and so it serves primarily as a gag for those on set who might be waiting on a shot, or performing as an extra in the hallway, and trying to suss out what that awful handwriting means.

If you’re not familiar with it, “Have you ever danced with the devi lin the pale moonlight?” is what Jack Nicholson’s Jack Napier asks of his victims immediately before killing them in 1989’s Batman. It’s the thing that ties The Joker back to Jack and allows Batman to realize that by defeating the Clown Prince of Crime, he’s also bringing his parents’ killer to justice.

And, of course, you’ll remember that Ezra Miller‘s Barry Allen appeared during the 2019-2020 event series “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” in which he shared the screen with The Flash (Grant Gustin) at the Arrowverse version fo STAR Labs.

So…hear us out: retroactively, we can now say that those Supergirl season 2 photos predicted that by 2022, Ezra MIller’s Flash would be battling the armies of Apokolips, teaming with Batman ’89, and trying to get the warning out to the heroes of Earth-Prime.

Because that’s what playing in a multiverse is all about.