The Flash has had one of the most bizarre rollouts in recent memory. The film was announced in 2014, and has since gone on to endure personnel changes, extensive rewrites, and legal controversy surrounding its star, Ezra Miller.
Despite these issues, The Flash has garnered rave reviews from everyone who has seen it. Stephen King calls it “heartfelt,” Tom Cruise says it has “everything you want in a movie,” and James Gunn, the new head of DC, considers it “unbelievably good.” In a sea of bloated superhero content, is The Flash a well-paced exception? Here’s what we know about the film’s runtime, and how it stacks up next to the rest of the DCEU.
The Flash has an official runtime of 144 minutes, or 2 hours and 24 minutes. While lengthy on its own, the runtime lands squarely in the middle when it comes to the rest of the DCEU. Especially when one looks at origin films. Man of Steel (2013) and Wonder Woman (2017) had runtimes of 143 and 141 minutes, respectively, and both proved to be successful with audiences. Aquaman (2018) had a runtime of 144 minutes, and managed to net $1.150 billion at the box office.
Given the number of characters that The Flash has to juggle, including Supergirl (Sasha Calle) and two different versions of Batman (Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck), it makes sense that the film would want to give them all ample screen time. Andy Muschetti, the film’s director, revealed that the assembly cut nearly doubled the runtime and came in at a whopping four hours.
The Flash runtime
The concept of a four-hour cut is nothing new for DCEU fans, given the widespread push, and subsequent praise, for Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021). Muschetti told the attendees of a Q&A event that he’d like to release the four-hour cut in the future, but felt that the slimmed down theatrical cut was the best version of the film.
“I’m definitely more happy with this version than the four-hour version,” he stated. “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.”
Long films are nothing new for Muschetti, either. The director reportedly ended up with a four-hour cut of It: Chapter 2 (2019), before deciding to trim it down to 169 minutes. He told Entertainment Weekly he’d like to release extended cuts of both It films, and perhaps even a version that combines both films with the cut footage, but no such version has materialized.
On the bright side, Muschetti said there are lots of deleted scenes from The Flash. He teased the exclusion of “cool” moments that flesh out the world of the titular hero, but were cut in order to maintain the pacing of the storyline. If the overwhelmingly positive response to the film is an indication of how it will do at the box office, then the odds of getting these deleted scenes, and even an extended cut, are very good.
Pardon the pun, but The Flash can’t get here fast enough.