The DCU Batman Movie Will Be a Flash Reunion

It sounds like Batman‘s ready to get nuts again. Bruce Wayne first offered that opportunity back in 1989, when Michael Keaton delivered the lines “You wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts!” in a scene with Jack Nicholson‘s Joker. Keaton put an updated spin on the line when he reprised the role for The Flash in 2023, in which he played an older, disillusioned Wayne forced back into action to save the multiverse alongside Barry Allen (Ezra MIller).

Although Keaton’s return to the Batcave was a major part of the movie, The Flash obviously isn’t a Batman movie. Yet, the people who brought him back will get more time with the Dark Knight soon. We’ve long known that Flash director Andy Muschietti would be helming The Brave and the Bold, the first Batman film in James Gunn‘s DCU. But we now know that he’ll be joined by The Flash screenwriter Christina Hodson.

Given the mixed response to The Flash, that news will probably thrill half the people who hear it and disappoint the other half. While The Flash enjoys a 63% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes and made $271 million worldwide, it was hardly a success. Among the knocks against it were charges that the script was too complicated, a multiversal storyline that involved multiple Batmen, multiple Flashes, and multiple Supermen, the latter represented by ill-considered CGI recreations of George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, and Nicolas Cage fighting a giant mechanical spider.

Based on the Flashpoint storyline from DC Comics, The Flash sees Barry Allen trying to undo the wrongful conviction of his father (Ron Livingston) for the murder of his mother (Maribel Verdú) by going back in time to prevent the event from happening. He creates a new reality, one in which Batman is not the guy he knows from the Justice League (played by Ben Affleck, who appears in a dreadful blue and grey costume in the film’s first act) and Superman never arrived on Earth. Yet, General Zod (Michael Shannon) is still coming to invade the Earth as he did in Man of Steel. Barry recruits this reality’s Batman, the retired weirdo played by Keaton, and Supergirl (Sasha Calle), who has been hidden in a government facility. At the end of the film, Barry returns to his own reality, but recreates the multiverse in the process, changing his world into one in which George Clooney is Batman, and creating Gunn’s DCU in the process.

So yeah, The Flash is a lot. And it only gets worse when you throw in the film’s tortured seven-year production schedule, star Miller’s crimes around the time of release, and the change in DC Studios regime to Gunn and Peter Safran a year before release.

Yet, for all of the problems with the movie, it’s hard to blame it on the script. The final version of the movie had to do heavy shared universe lifting, giving a reason to end the DCEU inaugurated with Man of Steel, and had to meet the demands of ‘member berry-style storytelling that DC wanted to emulate after Spider-Man: No Way Home. Despite that impossible task, Hodson crafted a remarkably clean script. Barry’s desire to save his mother, visualized with the simple image of a jar in a grocery store, runs across the entire film and even side characters like old man Batman and Supergirl have clear arcs.

When you also take into account Hodson’s great scripts for Birds of Prey, or the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn and Bumblebee, it’s clear that she excels at grounding outrageous stories in human emotions. Which is exactly what she’ll need to do with her Batman movie. Unlike the Matt Reeves movie The Batman: Part II, The Brave and the Bold takes place within the DCU continuity that began in Creature Commandos and Superman. It will pair Batman with Robin, who in this story has a convoluted backstory as the secret child of Bruce Wayne and Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter Talia, raised by assassins to take over the world.

In short, The Brave and the Bold will need someone like Hodson, a screenwriter who can keep stories grounded with emotional stakes, even when things get nuts.

The Brave and the Bold is currently in preproduction.