Major spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t yet watched The Flash on the big screen, so be warned!
For all that it’s centered on the fastest man alive within the world of DC Comics, The Flash certainly took a while to make its highly anticipated theatrical debut. With Ezra Miller in the starring role, the time-traveling blockbuster is finally here to deliver all the Flashpoint-adjacent emotional trauma that fans have been waiting for, and it broke open the DC multiverse in some pretty massive and unpredictable ways that will no doubt get picked apart by viewers. But as awesome as it was to witness gobsmacking moments such as Nicolas Cage’s live-action Superman (among other things), Andy Muschietti’s film somehow dropped the ball when paying off on the live-action history of its titular hero, and I’m all the more peeved that TV’s Scarlet Speeder Grant Gustin did not make a cameo appearance.
Let’s run through why ignoring the Arrowverse’s Barry Allen and that universe seems like such a glaring issue in my mind now after having watched The Flash feature in full.
Ezra Miller And Grant Gustin's Barry Allens Already Met
Thanks to the Arrowverse’ bonkers “Crisis on Infinite Earths.” which served as The CW franchise’s sixth big crossover, TV audiences already had the privilege of watching Grant Gustin’s Barry Allen sharing the screen with Ezra Miller’s Barry, which was a doozy of a moment. (Even for a TV event that also included appearances from ‘60s Batman star Burt Ward, Kevin Conroy’s Bruce Wayne and the Doom Patrol.) So no matter how one slices up the timeline shenanigans that take place within the movie, big-screen Barry should have the memory of meeting a wholly different version of himself. And in a film where he spent much of the runtime quasi-training himself as a teenager, one would think Ezra Miller’s character would have mentioned that previous incident, even if just in a throwaway line.
Aside from that, it’s also a bit of a face-smack for WB execs to have made the Miller cameo demand late in the game for the show’s creative team, presumably as a way to further bolster the show’s popularity, while apparently not making similar requests to include Gustin in the feature. The actor shared as much back in April when first confirming that he wouldn’t appear in the film, even though some fans were still holding out hope that his Barry Allen would show up in archival footage or something similar, especially since the actor wasn’t made aware that he was shown in Titans’ huge multiverse sequence until after the fact. His take was unfortunately correct in this case, however.
Ignoring Grant Gustin Is Flat-Out Weird Given All The Other Multiverse Connections
One of the biggest selling points for The Flash’s pre-release marketing for literal years now has been Michael Keaton’s return to the role(s) of Bruce Wayne and Batman. Had he been one of very few pieces of canonical connective tissue utilized in the timeline-changing chaos, I might not be so quick to question others’ absences. But this is also a movie that delivered Michael Shannon’s return as General Zod (even if he wasn’t so pumped about it), the perhaps final on-screen appearance from Ben Affleck’s Batman, and a bunch of literal alt-universe worlds colliding.
But those worlds were almost entirely focused on the various live-action iterations of Superman and Batman from the past 100 years. For example, moviegoers could see TV’s first Man of Steel George Reeves, a poignant shot of CGI Christopher Reeve alongside Helen Slater’s Supergirl, the Batman and Robin from the 1940s movie serials, the aforementioned Super Nick Cage, and way more. There were more than enough moments during that sequence (or elsewhere in the 144-minute movie) where Grant Gustin’s Barry could have been featured prominently, if temporarily, as everything started to converge. Hell, he could have easily lent a helping hand or two in the process, having already saved his Earth’s Central City and beyond from time-traveling no-nos. (Far too many of them, some might say.)
I personally would have found it to be awesome if Grant Gustin’s Barry was revealed to be the Dark Flash who’d spent years and years trying to perfect the time traveling rescue mission. Especially since that reveal was one of the film’s weaker moments.
At The Very Least, John Wesley Shipp Should Have Been Honored
Perhaps Andy Muschietti and the film’s producers felt that the Arrowverse’s Flash already featured too many examples of ‘90s Flash actor John Wesley Shipp returning as either Henry Allen or Jay Garrick. Or maybe there was another reason behind it all, but I couldn’t help but also feel a bit judgmental about the movie not paying respect to the first person to ever play The Flash in live-action. Shipp starred as Barry Allen for a single 22-episode season in the 1990s TV series, and went on to appear in even more Arrowverse episodes.
So even if there were issues over scheduling or timing or whatever when it came to bringing Grant Gustin into The Flash’s storyline fold, it’s possibly a bigger miscue for the movie to also not have paid direct tribute to Shipp ushering DC’s speedsters into live-action for the first time. Granted, he wasn’t the very first to play the part, as Mary Tyler Moore Show vet Ted Knight and voice acting great Jack Angel were two of the actors to voice Flash for the animated SuperFriends series. References to those two would have been cool as well, but nah.
No doubt various reasons exist for why The Flash so deliberately ignored its main character's own pop culture history, but it was still disappointing to walk out of the theater without witnessing any love being shown to the TV universe. But we can always return to Grant Gustin's version of the Speed Force with a Netflix subscription, assuming Barry didn't accidentally erase Netflix from existence at some point.
