Green Lantern 2, The Flash, and the DC Movie Universe We Never Saw

Since Green Lantern was intended to truly launch the first DC cinematic universe for Warner Bros. (by 2011, Superman Returns 2 was stillborn, and it was increasingly obvious that Christopher Nolan had no interest in making his Batman movies fit in anybody else’s sandbox), they commissioned a script for Green Lantern 2 from Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix scribe Michael Goldenberg.

But once the first Green Lantern movie debuted to tepid reviews and box-office, the writing was on the wall, and it’s not clear just how far things got. But there was another movie in active development at the same time that Green Lantern was hitting cinemas that was definitely going to occupy the same narrative space: The Flash.

Michael Green (yes, of Blade Runner 2049, American Gods, and many other cool things) and Marc Guggenheim wrote a fun, faithful script for The Flash movie, and a fella by the name of Greg Berlanti, currently making dreams come true as the man who has brought more DC superheroes to the screen than anyone else on the CW, was set to direct.

The Flash TV series, by the way, shares a number of similarities with this script, like Barry’s penchant for voiceovers, his living with the West family after the murder of his mother, and a wheelchair-bound Eobard Thawne who heads up STAR Labs (complete with a particle accelerator that is key to unlocking parallel universes).

To bring things full circle, it even featured a Marvel-style post-credits stinger that would have brought Hal Jordan to Central City to crack wise at Barry Allen… just to make it perfectly clear where everyone’s intentions were.