Warner Bros. Wants To Recast Iris West For Flashpoint, But Can They?

Right now the DCEU is in a state of flux. If everything had gone to plan, Justice League would have been the critical and commercial equal to Marvel’s Avengers and kicked off a hotly anticipated phase of DC characters solo movies. With the film a bit of a disaster, however, things are up in the air for Warner Bros. And their problems couldn’t be better illustrated than the current fix they’re in regarding who will play Iris West in Flashpoint.

Previously cast was Kiersey Clemons by director Rick Famuyiwa, and West was set to make her debut in Justice League before a full appearance in the Flash solo film. Unfortunately, the character ended up a victim of the editing scissors and never made it to the final cut of Justice League. Not only that, but Famuyiwa is off the project due to creative differences. So, given that the actor has never actually appeared on screen as West, you’d think it would be easy to digitally replace her in the scene and recast the role, right?

Wrong. Following Justice League‘s frosty reception, we’ve seen a steady stream of leaked scenes from Snyder’s cut, including Clemons’ debut (with incomplete VFX). Now, Warner Bros. are in a bit of a pickle as there aren’t many prominent roles for African-American women in superhero films and you can only imagine the controversy they’d cause if they ‘whitewash’ the part. Let’s face it, the DCEU really doesn’t need anymore bad press right now.

Anyways, according to Justice League VFX artist LDN_Films (via Reddit), here’s what’s going on:

“I’ve said before, we were replacing Clemons with a digital woman in the shot – Clemons was brought on because of Famuyiwa, when he bailed, it meant WB could recast her. That’s around the time the shot was cut. Now it’s been leaked online with her in it, they’ll probably stop all the work being done on it to replace her to stop fan backlash.”

So, right now, we simply don’t know whether Warner Bros. actually will recast Iris West, despite them clearly wanting to. Having said that, Flashpoint doesn’t even have a director at the moment, so who knows if the film’s even going to happen? I hope it does though, if only because the story comes with an inbuilt continuity reset button that should allow them another crack at this whole extended universe thing.