Every Batman In The Flash Trailer Explained
There's not a lot of truth to be found in show business, but one fact remains concrete: Given enough time and boiled chicken, every actor in Hollywood will eventually play Batman. It's the same principle as heat death, but with Danny Elfman writing the music.
For proof, you need only look at "The Flash," the bottom-of-the-ninth DCEU mega-blockbuster that's been teetering on the brink of actually coming out for nearly five years now. Thanks to now-familiar multiversal shenanigans, the film is rumored to feature all manner of Batman, with scuttlebutt pointing to potential cameos from the likes of George Clooney and, somehow even less believably, Christian Bale.
At the moment, however, fans can only be sure of what they've seen in the trailer (and maybe not even that, if they learned anything from "Morbius.") Let's take a look at "The Flash's" big game spot, and explore every single confirmed Batman.
Batfleck Re-returns
In a field strewn with very sad men, each more orphaned than the last, one surly billionaire stands sadder and more orphaned than the rest: Batfleck, the Dunkinest Batman in the Whole World. Abandoned not only by the deaths of his parents but by a chaotic and rudderless studio system to boot, Ben Affleck's Batman has had a rough go of things. First introduced in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," he sported an "anything you can do, I can do grimmer" attitude towards the Dark Knights of the past and a display case full of dead child clothes. He didn't like Superman. Then he thought Superman was okay.
From there, things get dicey, thanks to the narrative rat king that the DCEU rapidly became. Affleck's Batman made a cameo appearance in "The Suicide Squad" before getting inexplicably pithy in Joss Whedon's cut of "Justice League." Then he did a lot of the same stuff, but more angrily and for significantly longer, during the Snyder Cut; the fan service equivalent of a toddler screaming that they want toothpaste for dinner long enough that their parents finally give in.
Thanks to his largely unexplored history of personal tragedies and his glimpses into a dark potential future via unexplained naptime prognostications, this version of Gotham's protector is pretty beautifully set up as a sage advisor to young Barry Allen on the dangers of doinking with reality.
Batman '89
It's funny how things work out. One minute, you've got hordes of vocal fans of the source material starting letter-writing campaigns to keep you out of the role of Batman and then next thing you know, it's 34 years later, and the whole world is foaming at the mouth to get you back in that thick rubber cowl.
Michael Keaton's Batman isn't just the beneficiary of generations-spanning rose-colored nostalgia goggles. Perhaps even more than Christopher Reeve's Superman, he ushered in an era of superhero movies played straight. Keaton's exit from the franchise following the second film in the series coincided suspiciously with an abrupt nosedive in Batman movie quality, making the Academy Award nominee a natural symbol for a world of lost potential. While comic books like "Batman '89" would explore what might have been, fans dreamed of a world where Batman returned. Again.
And now he has. At 71 years old, Keaton will be the most senior Dark Knight on screen by a wide stretch, but classics never age out. From what we've seen in the trailer, he'll be rocking the same Batmobile and crime-fighting gear that he brought to the table back in 1989. More than that, he gets to benefit from the advent of wildly expensive CGI, making for what appear to be some excessively awesome fight sequences and, if we're very lucky, the very real possibility that this version of Batman will get to turn his neck for once. That'd be nuts. Let's get nuts.