The following post contains potential SPOILERS for The Flash. But pretty much all of those potential spoilers are also rumors, and should be taken as such.

The interwebs are currently a flutter with a whole bunch of rumors about the plot of The Flash, the long-awaited solo film for DC Comics’ fastest man alive, played by Ezra Miller. It’s already known that the film is inspired by a comic storyline called “Flashpoint,” where time travel alters the world and creates a darker reality that only Flash recognizes and must repair. The outcome of this new reality, according to these rumors — and again, at this point, this is a rumor — would be that The Flash marks the end of the DC Extended Universe, or at least a major departure from everything that has come before, sending it off in a totally different direction in the future.

Per TMZ, “a handful of movie insiders claiming to have seen a cut of the new Flash film,” say, among other things, that the movie marks the final appearances of Ben Affleck’s Batman and Henry Cavill’s Superman. Others claim The Flash completely erases the previous DC Extended Universe movies — which started with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel and continued with Batman v Superman: Dawn of JusticeSuicide SquadWonder WomanJustice LeagueAquamanShazamBirds of PreyWonder Woman 1984, and The Suicide Squad — and creates a new Justice League out of some of the new characters introduced in The Flash.

At least some of that lines up with what we know about the other big DC movie in development, the solo Batgirl movie. Batgirl features DCEU staple J.K. Simmons as Commissioner Gordon, but also features Michael Keaton as the older version of Bruce Wayne and Batman he’ll be reintroducing in The Flash. Ben Affleck has also said recently that he’s done with “IP movies” and you can’t really be done with IP movies and keep grinding out Batman appearances every couple of years. So it would be surprising if The Flash wasn’t Affleck’s final appearance as the Dark Knight.

On the other hand, some of these DCEU franchises are clearly going to continue; there’s another Shazam! movie coming out soon, and there’s been plenty of talk of another Wonder Woman movie as well. Just last month, Spider-Man: No Way Home showed that it’s possible to combine different movie universes without erasing them entirely from existence. If anything, fans want the opposite. They want everything to exist together simultaneously, like No Way Home. So the notion that The Flash will completely erase all those previous movies from existence seems very unlikely. At some point in Hollywood, everything comes back.

We’ll see what shakes out when The Flash opens in theaters, which is currently scheduled to happen on November 4, 2022.

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