Avengers: Endgame Advisor Helping Out on The Flash

When Hollywood wants to make their science sound okay on the big screen, since they know Neil deGrasse Tyson is eventually going to see their movie, they call one man, Clifford V. Johnson. A British theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Southern California, Johnson has worked on the likes of The Martian, Interstellar, Arrival, plus major Marvel movies like Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame. Johnson has apparently lent a hand to Marvel’s Distinguished competition as he revealed in a new interview with Indiewire. Though it’s unclear if he’s still consulting on the film, the outlet reveals that Johnson previously worked on the movie with one of its early set of writers.

From what we know about The Flash movie, we can likely make a guess about the kind of questions that Johnson was asked regarding the science of the film. It’s long been reported that the film will tell a version of the “Flashpoint” storyline, which sees Ezra Miller‘s Barry Allen go back in time to stop his mother’s murder, resulting in a very different future. Johnson is no stranger to time travel scenarios with his work on the previous Avengers movies, as he outlined in the interview.

“The idea was to give them a lot of knowledge about what time-travel scenarios they could play with, but then step back and let them choose as writers what they were going to do,” Johnson said of working on Avengers: Endgame. “I saw a lot of what I gave them onscreen….They wanted a time-travel heist to be the core fo the movie. One of their questions was, ‘What flavor of movie time travel do they use?’ I was trying to help tell them about the real science and the need for internal consistency.”

The Flash will be directed by It helmer Andy Muschietti, with a script from Birds of Prey‘s Christina Hodson, and Ezra Miller returning to his role as the Scarlet Speedster. News on the film is expected to be officially announced at this year’s digital event, DC Fandome.

“What captivated me about The Flash is the human drama in it,” Muschietti explained in a previous interview. “The human feelings and emotions that play in the drama [of it]. It’s going to be fun, too. I can’t promise that there will be any horror [elements in it], really, but it’s a beautiful human story.”

The Flash will speed into theaters on June 3, 2022