With the eagerly anticipated The Flash movie taking on DC’s multiverse, appearances from various characters — and the actors who have played them across other projects in the past — is par for the course. Even heading into the film, fans can already expect to see one major return with Michael Keaton suiting up as Batman once again, decades after he last played the character. But while fans are expecting to see a myriad of different cameo appearances and references, there’s only so much room to pack them in and now, The Flash’s director and producer, Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti, reveal that many cameos and Easter eggs were cut from among DC legends — including a few that may surprise.
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ComicBook.com was on hand for a special screening and Q&A for the film and during the event the Muschietti’s revealed that there were a lot of characters that they had to let go in terms of cameos simply because of time constraints.
“We had a lot more characters that we know we had to let go, because there just wasn’t time,” Barbara said.
“That Hall of Fame of great characters and actors that play these characters, there’s so many,” Andy added. “The list was endless. We had to choose. We had to pick. Linda Carter was one of them … Brando and Burgess Meredith, Caesar Romero, all the classics. We grew up watching the series. Our first Batman was Adam West.”
Responding to a question from Geeks of Color’s Dorian Parks about whether The Flash TV show’s Grant Gustin was ever in contention for a cameo, the director confirmed it, adding: “Of course, as I said before the list of cameos…was huge. So obviously we played with the idea of including DC characters from TV, but we just had to pick.”
Time, it turns out, was a major consideration when it came to putting The Flash into its finished form. The Muschiettis also revealed that the first assembly version of The Flash was four hours long which means a lot of things were cut out — but Andy also explained that he was much happier with the final version than that original, longer cut.
“I’m definitely more happy with this version than the four-hour version. Just like it’s something that you get excited and you start improvising with actors and suddenly you have a scene that has doubled the duration that was timed when they were timing the script,” he said. “But it happens all the time. It was also three hours and a half, and It Two was like five hours. I don’t know. And then you have to face the edit and say, “Okay. We need to remove one hour and a half of this movie, and how it’s going to happen?” It’s always at the end it’s fun. At the end of six months, it’s fun. At the beginning, it’s just chaos and whatever you start doing is wrong seen in hindsight. Because it’s trial and error and you try a lot of things.”
What is The Flash movie about?
In The Flash, Barry Allen travels back in time to prevent his mother’s murder, which brings unintended consequences to his timeline. The Flash is directed by IT‘s Muschietti, with a script from Birds of Prey and Batgirl’s Christina Hodson. It will star Ezra Miller as Barry Allen / The Flash, both Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton‘s iterations of Bruce Wayne / Batman, as well as Sasha Calle as Supergirl, Kiersey Clemons as Iris West, Ron Livingston as Henry Allen, Maribel Verdu as Nora Allen, Ian Loh as a young Barry Allen, and Saoirse-Monica Jackson and Rudy Mancuso playing currently-unknown roles.
The Flash is currently set to be released exclusively in theaters on Friday, June 16th.
