When The Flash launched in October 2014—the second venture of the CW’s daring try and flesh out its personal superhero cinematic universe—its premiere episode ended with a daring assertion: not solely would the sequence be nonetheless entering into a decade’s time, it will have grown sufficient to deal with some of the iconic tales in DC Comics historical past, Disaster on Infinite Earths.
Ten years later, we’ve arrived at that fateful April 25, 2024 date—and you understand what? The Flash was sort of proper, give or take just a few temporal quibbles.
Over time as The Flash delved increasingly into the time-bending shenanigans of the Velocity Power, that notorious premiere stinger modified and developed—who wrote the story twisted, generally it vanished, generally it nonetheless occurred, after which, after all, the present truly modified it once more when it determined to shunt up its timeline and do Disaster on Infinite Earths in 2019, having Barry vanish in disaster a full 5 years earlier than predicted.
However that in and of itself was a mirrored image of simply how that preliminary daring assertion was one thing The Flash was continuously working in direction of, and in the end managed to encapsulate over its lifetime. Arrow began the CW-DC universe, completely, giving it the grounding aspect and cleaning soap operatic drama that might gasoline its ascension to the premiere superhero universe on the small display. But it surely was The Flash that took it into the stratosphere: it was there that its stewards actually embraced the superpowered aspect, the esoteric weirdness that was, on the time, nonetheless one thing superhero variations had been cautious of.
That embrace would in flip pave the way in which for not simply tales that tackled all this comedian ebook wildness on the small display—not simply tales that might in flip affect Arrow to develop into one thing wildly past its authentic imagining—however tales that might go on to pave the way in which for an entire universe of exhibits. With out The Flash doing what it did, there would’ve been no Supergirl, no Legends of Tomorrow, no Black Lightning and Batwoman. There wouldn’t have been the community, or the boldness, for The Flash to drag all these sequence collectively, after which some, to adapt Disaster on Infinite Earths in any respect, not to mention 5 years before it dreamed to.
And but, in a method the sequence’ prediction nonetheless got here true anyway. A decade on from that premiere, The Flash isn’t any extra, having come to an finish in Could 2023. Additionally no extra is the CW-DC universe at massive—each present in that continuity has, over the previous few years, died its personal dying, save for the adjoining Superman & Lois, a sequence that paradoxically needed to try to keep it up the legacy of the CW-DC exhibits earlier than it however was, actually, explicitly distanced from them. And even that is now coming to an finish. In 2024, the Flash actually continues to be lacking—and there’s a disaster of types at DC, because it slowly turns round on its cinematic plans for future TV and movies within the DC universe underneath James Gunn and Peter Safran. The Flash film lastly emerged final yr, when the Ezra Miller-helmed movie stumbled into an ungainly farewell to an period of DC film making that had largely died within the time it had taken to wade via after years of re-iteration and delays—ones lengthy sufficient that The Flash itself had already managed to sneak itself a crossover with Grant Gustin’s cinematic counterpart alongside the way in which.
It’s maybe becoming then, in The Flash’s time-bending method, that that first daring prediction paradoxically acquired each refuted and turned true within the bizarre, wild 10 years it took to get us so far. However maybe that’s one of the best ways to mark a disaster in any case this time, anyway.
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