The Flash initially had a 4-hour assembly cut
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Will this be a case of #ReleasetheMuschiettiCut?
During a Q&A event with press for The Flash in Los Angeles on Monday, director Andy Muschietti revealed his first assembly cut of the movie ran four hours, from which he was forced to cut about one-and-a-half hours.
"If you see the four-hour version of this movie, which was my first assembly, you will see what I left out," Muschietti said, with producer Barbara Muschietti by his side in a theater on the Warner Bros. lot. When asked if fans would ever get to see the extended cut, similar to how HBO Max dropped the four-hour-long Zack Snyder's Justice League, the filmmaker replied, "Maybe."
"I'm definitely more happy with this version than the four-hour version," he continued. "You get excited and you start improvising with actors, and suddenly you have a scene that has doubled the duration that was timed when they were timing the script. But it happens all the time."
It does for Muschietti, at least. The director previously told EW that an early assembly cut of his movie It: Chapter Two was also four hours in length.
Warner Bros. Pictures Ezra Miller's Barry Allen, Michael Keaton's Batman, and Sasha Calle's Supergirl assemble on 'The Flash' poster
The Flash stars Ezra Miller as Barry Allen, who uses his super speed to travel through time. By changing the past to save his mother, he inadvertently creates a new reality in which General Zod (Michael Shannon) is invading Earth and there are no superheroes to deal with him. In order to prevent annihilation, Barry must team up with his past self, a retired alt-reality Batman (Michael Keaton), and Superman's cousin Kara Zor-El (Sasha Calle's Supergirl).
Muschietti mentioned another cut of The Flash ran three-and-a-half hours, and then another ran five hours. "Then you have to face the edit and say, 'Okay, we need to remove one-and-a-half [hours] of this movie, and how is it gonna happen?' At the end of six months, it's fun. At the beginning, it's just chaos. And whatever you start doing is wrong because it's trial and error, and you try a lot of things."
"This is really the best version of the movie," Muschietti reaffirms of the cut screened for press in Los Angeles and for the CinemaCon crowd in Las Vegas Tuesday. Without getting into spoilers, he confirmed, "There are things that are interesting, if you see the deleted scenes at some point. But some are more interesting than others. Many things are very cool things, but they somehow stepped on the propulsion and the pacing of the movie, which is something that you always have to have in mind."
The Flash will be released in theaters June 16.
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