‘It was Professor Zoom pulling the strings’: The original version of ‘The Flash’ would have turned the entire SnyderVerse upside down

Everybody knows The Flash went through countless iterations before Andy Muschietti finally dragged it over the finishing line this summer, which all proved to be for nothing when the Scarlet Speedster’s solo debut ended up as one of the biggest box office bombs of all-time.

Barely connected to the SnyderVerse, the multiversal caper occupies a bizarre place in canon that’s tied directly to several of the movies that came before, but discards a lot of them in favor of a reality where Michael Keaton is still Batman, before yet another timeline emerges that ensures the events of the film aren’t going to impact whatever James Gunn is cooking up.

And yet, in an interview with Inverse, DC veteran Jay Olivia revealed that Rick Famuyiwa’s spin on the story would have not only launched an entire Flash franchise, but introduced a second big bad to the DCEU that would complement the looming threat of Darkseid.

“Rick’s movie wasn’t the Flashpoint movie. Originally, there was supposed to be just Zack’s five films and one side movie, which ended up being Suicide Squad. Rick’s movie was going to be a series of films, just like Aquaman. I think all of those films, they were planning to be trilogies. Rick’s movie was laying the groundwork for Zoom as the big baddy of the DC Universe.

It was Professor Zoom pulling the strings because he had come from the future to basically f*ck with Barry. In the Flash movies, Zoom would be the villain in the background. But also in the ancillary other films, you would see some of the influences of Zoom on the rest of the Justice League.”

The loss of the SnyderVerse has been lamented by many for over half a decade now, but we’ll be curious to see how everyone reacts knowing that there was a secondary antagonist ready to wreak temporal chaos, the ramifications of which would have stretched franchise-wide.