DC Embraces The Multiverse Across TV & Film #DCFanDome
During a couple of panels during the DC FanDome event today, Chief Creative Officer of DC Comics (and brilliant comic book artist) Jim Lee, laid out how there has been a shift in the company’s thinking on how their tv and film universes interact. Welcome to the multiverse!
The idea of a DC Multiverse, where disparate characters from various comic books and eras lived on different “Earths”, but could crossover, has been kicking around since the 1940s. However, it was first fully solidified in the iconic Flash story ‘Flash of Two Worlds’ in 1961, which saw Barry Allen meet Earth-2 Flash, Jay Garrick. This was followed by yearly JLA/JSA “Crisis” event crossovers, up until 1985’s seminal ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’, which collapsed the Multiverse into a unified “Earth”… But that, pretty quickly, caused its own set of problems, with continuity errors popping up, and stories which didn’t fit into the main “Earth” being branded as “Elseworld” tales. This eventually led to the comic book Multiverse being reborn.
The Multiverse has been a useful tool in the comic books but had never been embraced by the film or tv shows… That was until Arrowverse boss, Greg Berlanti, decided to pull everything together with the recent ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ tv crossover. During the ‘Multiverse 101’ panel, Jim Lee alongside Berlanti, and WB’s DC-related film boss, Walter Hamada got together and explained how that event has seen a shift in thinking at the company.
“Up to this point, the company was organized where TV was TV and film was film,” commented Hamada, who went on to explain that there had historically been many discussions about who could use what character on what medium. If a character might be used in a movie, they didn’t want that character used on TV. “It became this really weird situation where the fans love the characters, they just want to see the characters.” By embracing the multiverse, as they did in the comics, it “opens the door for us to do more crossovers, to really lean into this idea and acknowledge the fact there can be a Flash on TV and one in the movies, and you don’t have to pick one or the other, and they both exist in this multiverse.”
This point was reinforced in a recent Vanity Fair interview with Andy Muschietti, director of the Ezra Miller fronted ‘The Flash’ movie. The main headline from that was that Ben Affleck would be donning the cowl once again as Batman in the upcoming film. However, there was a larger point in that interview about the multiverse. Whilst we don’t know the exact plotline to the movie, we do know it’s an adaptation of 2011 ‘Flashpoint’, which saw Barry Allen go back in time to try and stop the death of his mother and screwing up the timeline in the process. We also know that Micheal Keaton with be returning as Batman/Bruce Wayne, reprising his role from the Tim Burton era films, implying some messing about in the multiverse.
“This movie is a bit of a hinge in the sense that it presents a story that implies a unified universe where all the cinematic iterations that we’ve seen before are valid,” commented Muschietti. “It’s inclusive in the sense that it is saying all that you’ve seen exists, and everything that you will see exists, in the same unified multiverse.”
This is not the first venture into the Multiverse for Ezra’s Barry Allen though. That actually happened in the ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ tv crossover when Grant Gustin’s TV Flash meets his movie counterpart. It seems meeting has actually become rather more important than just being a fun little bit of “fan service”. It actually helped pushed forward the idea internally at DC that all these things can exist in the same multiverse.
So where does that leave things for DC film and tv?
On the TV side, despite what you may have thought, the ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ event didn’t collapse the entire multiverse, but it did collapse the Arrowverse into one Earth (Earth-Prime) as we have seen on the CW shows. TV shows outside of the Arrowverse, such as the DC Universe/HBO Max shows, like ‘Titans’ and ‘Doom Patrol’, exist on their own “Earth” as part of the multiverse.
On the film side, ‘The Flash’ movie will set up how the multiverse will be used on the big screen. However, it was also revealed that Matt Reeves upcoming film ‘The Batman’, which sees Robert Pattinson don the cape and cowl, will be set in “Year 2” of Batman’s career, and will be in a separate part of the multiverse from the Zac Snyder’s ‘Justice League’. This frees up Reeves to expand that world – something which he is looking at doing with a Gotham PD HBO Max series – without stepping on the toes of the existing ‘Aquaman’, ‘Wonder Woman’ etc… films, which sit in Snyder’s corner of the multiverse. It also means that we may possibly see some Batfleck appear in later movies, should he want to return to the character in the future.
Additionally, the multiverse approach gives DC the opportunity to make more films, such as the critically-acclaimed ‘Joker’, which would also sit separately in their own part of the multiverse. However, Hamada did comment in the panel that they had “nothing in development at the moment” relating to more stand-alone films.
Speaking about the TV Flash meeting the film Flash, Hamada did say “I do think moving forward there are more opportunities to do things like this,” so, who knows where this may lead… R-Pats or Affleck’s Batman meeting TV’s new Batwoman Javicia Leslie? Momoa’s Aquaman popping in to help out Supergirl? Whichever way you look at it, DC fans are in for a bright future full of superheroes on the big and small screen!
