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.
