In the theatrical edition of Justice League, Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen was almost exclusively used for comic relief, becoming the main conduit for Joss Whedon’s unstoppable desire to populate his scripts with as many zingers as possible.
The Flash had a much bigger and more important role to play in the Snyder Cut, though, which both deepened his backstory and saw him taken under the wing of Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne. While Warner Bros. and DC Films remain adamant that the SnyderVerse is over, Miller’s upcoming solo movie is set to pick up right where both editions of Justice League left off.
In a new interview at DC FanDome China, the actor admitted that the DCEU’s all-star epic will inform his journey in The Flash, but Barry’s arc is still going to be an origin story of sorts.
“I think this is a story that precipitates a lot of change for Barry Allen in more ways than one. I think it really carries him from being sort of the person who we met in the Justice League films. The Flash takes him from that place of a young person who has come to his powers but doesn’t quite know how to manifest them, who’s joined a legion of superheroes but doesn’t quite know his place in the context of it, and it takes him from there to really, in my mind, being Barry Allen. Being the Flash. I think in some ways, it’s an origin story, and a coming-into-his-own story, so it’s a big one. A big arc for Barry.”
It’s always helpful when an ambitious superhero project like The Flash doesn’t have to go down the origin story route, with Miller already having been introduced to audiences in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League. We already know who this guy is and what motivates him, giving director Andy Muschietti much greater leeway to dive straight into the action without becoming bogged down in explaining how he got his powers or why he decided to use them in such fashion.