How The Flash, many years in the works and beset by turmoil, finally reached the finish line

It’s an apt if intentionally understated description of getting The Flash into theatres on Jun 16 (it opens Jun 14 in Singapore). Movie versions of the lightning quick comic book character have been in various stages of development since the late 1980s. One scenario had Ryan Reynolds starring and David S Goyer directing; another had George Miller setting the stage for spinoffs and standalones with Adam Brody.

Then in 2014, things started taking shape as Warner Bros plotted out a shared universe of DC Comics films, including a standalone Flash starring Miller as Barry Allen, who would first appear in Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice, Suicide Squad and Justice League.

But even that wasn’t so straightforward, with disagreements over tone and scheduling conflicts making things complicated. Several writers and directors cycled in and out of developing The Flash, including Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Seth Grahame-Smith, Rick Famuyiwa, Robert Zemeckis and John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, and release dates were pushed back. Ezra Miller even worked on their own treatment of a script.

The Muschiettis were finishing It Chapter Two when the studio approached them about The Flash. They didn’t concern themselves with the messy, marathon development history – they just wanted to figure out if this was worth several years of their life. In the story, Andy Muschietti found a compelling emotional core: The relationship between Barry Allen and his mother, who was killed when he was a child and whom he wants to go back in time to save. Back To The Future, which is referenced quite a bit in The Flash, was one of their favourite movies, too. They were in.

Birds Of Prey screenwriter Christina Hobson had taken a crack at the story and come out with something that was both fun and emotional and introduced the multiverse to the DC cannon. In Barry Allen’s quest to save his mother, he accidentally gets tossed into another timeline and meets a younger, different version of himself who gets swept up in the journey. It allowed for lots of possibilities, including bringing Keaton back in a movie that also had Ben Affleck’s Zack Snyder Batman.

“We all got very excited about the prospect of having Michael Keaton come back after 30 years of not knowing what Batman was up to,” Andy Muschietti said. “The multiverse allowed this to happen and combine the existing characters, the existing universe, with something that seemed to have been buried in the past.”