WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Season 6 of The Flash, which airs Tuesdays on The CW.
Warner Bros. unveiled a revised schedule for its release slate of upcoming DC movies. Certain films have been pushed back, like Shazam! 2, while The Flash film, set to star Ezra Miller in the title role, was moved up by a month. The movie, which is now set to hit theaters June 3, 2022, has been stuck in development for a long time, but the studio is still hopeful it will arrive in two years.
However, the film's massive delays have led to a rather odd problem. As Forbes' Scott Mendelson pointed out on Twitter, Warner Bros.' superhero film slate was first announced in October 2014, a week after The Flash, starring Grant Gustin as the Scarlet Speedster, first premiered on The CW. Therefore, depending on how many seasons the show has left, it could potentially end before the film is ever released, especially if it follows in the footsteps of Arrow.
Although a solo film starring the Scarlet Speedster was first announced in 2014, we now find ourselves six years later with no Flash movie. That is partly because the film has had a long and troublesome road to production that has yet to be over. In fact, the movie has changed writers and directors on multiple occasions, and it seems that its very premise has yet to be determined. At one point, the movie was rumored to team Barry Allen up with Victor Stone/Cyborg. Then, it appeared as if the movie would adapt the Flashpoint storyline from the comics, to varying degrees of faithfulness to the source material. Now, we just don't know, and the villains of the piece haven't been confirmed either.
And that is without mentioning all of the studio shake-ups that resulted in a change of direction for the DC Extended Universe following the mixed reception of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League.
During that time, Barry Allen sped into super-heroics on the small screen. Over the course of six seasons, Grant Gustin's Scarlet Speedster and his friends have gone up against the superhero's biggest comic book villains: Reverse-Flash, Zoom, Savitar, the Thinker, Godspeed, the Rogues and, most recently, Bloodwork. What's more, Barry also created a version of the Flashpoint reality, traveled to the past and the future, ran alongside his future daughter, got married, took part in a battle to save all of the Multiverse from the Anti-Monitor and founded the Justice League. Plus, he even met Ezra Miller's Barry Allen thanks to the Speed Force.
Essentially, The CW's Barry Allen has been through the biggest storylines comic book fans could ever hope to see in live-action. As for the Scarlet Speedster's first solo film? Well, that still has yet to happen. Recently, The CW series resumed its sixth season. While we don't yet know how long the series will go for, we might get an idea thanks to its sister series, Arrow. After premiering in 2012, Arrow aired its series finale this past January, bringing the series to a close after eight seasons.
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Therefore, if The Flash also concludes after eight seasons and keep to its historically consistent schedule, the series finale would air in May 2022, one month before the planned release of the film. This would mean that The Flash television show would have run as long as Arrow did before the Flash movie ever arrives in theaters.
If the movie does hit this release date, it will have arrived eight years after being originally announced. And in that time, Barry Allen will have had close to a decade of adventures on The CW.
Airing Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW, The Flash stars Grant Gustin, sea Candice Patton, Carlos Valdes, Danielle Panabaker, Tom Cavanagh, Jesse L. Martin, Danielle Nicolet and Hartley Sawyer.