A warning, this episode contains discussion of assault.

The superhero movie The Flash has had a rocky trip to theaters.

It's faced allegations against its star, rewrites, studio turnover, and COVID delays.

The film was always intended as a hard reset of the DC cinematic universe, which has had a rough go of it itself lately.

But while the Flash was being finished, a new creative director took over production of DC movies

and promised to take the studio in a new direction.

In that context, what are audiences to make of The Flash?

Is it a new start or simply the last product of the outgoing regime which was responsible

for a string of critical and commercial disappointments.

I'm Glenn Weldon.

And I'm Linda Holmes and on this episode of NPR's pop culture happy hour, we're going to have a different

kind of discussion about the Flash because we have to. There is so much baggage. of the

kind of discussion about the flash because we have to.

We've both seen the movie and we'll get to our thoughts on it in a little bit,

but first we're going to talk a little bit about the troubled production

and what's happening with

DC Studios. Now the Flash has certainly been all over television for years. There was a

90s live action series starring John Wesley's ship and the CW series starring Grant

Guston that just wrapped after nine seasons but they have been trying to get a

movie off the ground for a long time, right?

Oh, man, yeah.

There have been attempts to make a flash live-action movie

...