The Flash Screened an Unfinished Cut at CinemaCon

The Flash is speeding toward the finish line. With another six weeks left until its exclusive theatrical run on June 16th, Warner Bros. previewed an unfinished cut of the well-received DC movie at its first public screening at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Tuesday night. Attendees of the annual convention of movie theater owners were the first to watch The Flash, introduced by Warner Bros. Domestic Distribution Chief Jeff Goldstein and International Distribution Chief Andrew Cripps as a “work in progress” and “not the final cut, but close enough.” 

When director Andy Muschietti and producer Barbara Muschietti took the CinemaCon stage to present The Flash in full, the siblings reiterated that the version screened exclusively for press and exhibitors was “not completely finished.” The mostly-finished Flash ran for roughly 150 minutes without credits or post-credits scenes, which were not included in the version screened Tuesday night.

Early social media reactions from ComicBook and other outlets have been favorable, with some calling The Flash “among the best superhero movies ever made” and “a superhero Back to the Future.”

Set in the DC Extended Universe, The Flash sees Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), the fastest man alive, use the Speed Force to travel back in time and save his ill-fated parents: his murdered mother Nora (Maribel Verdú) and his wrongly convicted father Henry (Ron Livingston). But when Barry creates an alternate reality without a Justice League, he must team with his younger self (Miller), the Kryptonian Kara Zor-El/Supergirl (Sasha Calle), and a retired Batman (Michael Keaton) to save the world from General Zod’s (Michael Shannon) invasion that nearly destroyed the planet in Man of Steel.

During a press event attended by ComicBook, Muschietti revealed his initial assembly cut clocked in at a lengthy four hours. 

“If you see the four-hour version of this movie, which was my first assembly, you will see what I left out,” Muschietti said. “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. But it happens all the time. IT was also three hours and a half, and IT: Chapter Two was like five hours.”

Muschietti continued: “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.”

At CinemaCon, the Muschiettis described the emotional — and nerve-racking — aspect of previewing The Flash for an audience after a “four-year journey” to the screen. That journey ends when The Flash opens only in theaters June 16th.