There is another version of The Flash that never made it to the screen, and this one had no Batman in it at all.
John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein wrote an earlier take on the movie and were hired to direct it in 2018 before exiting a year later, when Andy Muschietti took over.
In a new interview with The Playlist promoting their film Mayday, Daley was asked how much of their script survived. He said the idea of Barry teaming up with his slightly younger self carried over, and everything else was different.
“We had a version where Bruce Wayne never became Batman,” Daley said. “And so he was just this sort of billionaire party boy who’s aimless and doesn’t know what to do with his life. And we love the idea of sort of thrusting him into a hero position. That is not in the film. They made it Michael Keaton’s Batman. So not a lot survived.”
Not A Lot Survived
Christina Hodson wrote the screenplay on the finished film.
Daley and Goldstein share a “story by” credit with Joby Harold, which means pieces of their plot made it in, but the script that got shot was not theirs.
The movie also went the opposite direction with Bruce Wayne.
Instead of a Bruce who never put on the cowl, it brought back Michael Keaton’s Batman from the 1989 and 1992 Tim Burton movies and built the marketing around him.
Their version was not the only one that died along the way.
Ezra Miller and comic book writer Grant Morrison pitched their own darker take on the movie around the same time, and the studio passed on that one too.
The Movie Kept Changing After They Left
Even the version Muschietti shot was not the version that reached theaters.
The ending he filmed had Henry Cavill’s Superman, Sasha Calle’s Supergirl, and Keaton’s Batman standing together.
That got cut and replaced with the George Clooney scene, a change reports at the time said came from James Gunn as the new DC Studios regime took over.
DC insiders filled us in on the full original ending back in July 2023, which also had Ben Affleck’s Batman trapped in the Multiverse and calling to Barry for help.
The VFX went unfinished on top of that, something Muschietti claimed was a creative choice, but not according to our insiders. The movie bombed in June 2023 with about $271 million worldwide.
Muschietti’s next DC project is the DCU’s Batman movie, The Brave and the Bold, with Hodson again writing.
Per filmmaker Dan Marcus, Muschietti says all work on it is on hold until the Paramount merger is settled, which Gunn denies, and the merger trial is set for March 2027.
Daley and Goldstein’s Mayday, starring Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh, streams September 4 on Apple TV.
