The Best Part Of The Flash Movie Trailer Was The Comics Ad At The End
"The Flash" movie has had as many problems during production as the actual Flash has villains, with almost a decade since the project was first announced plagued by changes in the crew, star controversies, and an arrest or two. But now, the film is finally — presumably — coming out this year.
The first trailer for the first live-action Flash movie is finally here, and it honestly looks kind of great. We got our first look at Supergirl, Michael Keaton returning as Batman (and now with several more suits than before!), Batfleck with a grey and blue suit, and even the return of national treasure Michael Shannon as General Zod. Even though the trailer makes the film look too small for the story it is based on, it looks fun.
But after all the teasing about the story, the Easter eggs, and the "I'm Batman" lines, the best part of the trailer actually came at the tail end when we got an ad promoting comic books. It's an unusual move, but a very welcomed one, and hopefully the start of a new standard.
Promote comics!
The ad shows three books, "The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive" which is an official tie-in for the movie that serves as a prequel to the story, "Flashpoint," the biggest inspiration for the film, and one of the biggest comic book events DC has done in years. The last one is, well, the first volume of The New 52 "Flash," as reimagined by Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato.
With this, you get a cool connection that expands the story (but hopefully isn't an actual necessity to understand the film), the miniseries that inspired the plot, and a great place to start fresh for newcomers wanting to know more about the character.
A lot has been written about the terrible way studios treat the creators of the source material that fuels their billion-dollar franchises, and how they get no credit, let alone compensation for creating the characters. To see Warner Bros. Discovery and DC Studios so prominently advertise comic books is a great sign. If you like the movie, here are more stories for you! If you don't, well, the book was better anyway, so here it is!
Marvel should be doing this, particularly once they started changing the character designs to resemble the actors that portray them. If you enjoyed "Captain Marvel," why not go back and read her origin story? There are hundreds of hours of entertainment to be discovered while you wait for the sequel to come out, so why not promote them?
It's not hard to do!
Promoting comics is something that anime actually does rather well. It is a common belief among fans that anime is made only to advertise its source material, and while that isn't necessarily the rule, anime adaptations are definitely part of a larger marketing strategy for popular manga. The thing is, it works. Nearly every big manga gets a boost the moment their anime adaptation gets announced, and even more so once it starts streaming. This is how "Demon Slayer" went from a decent manga with some die-hard fans to one of the biggest properties in Japan once the anime started airing.
Granted, an anime production budget is nowhere near that of a big superhero movie, but if you have nearly a century's worth of stories for the characters you're making a movie about, why is it so hard to tell viewers to go read them? With the way James Gunn not only prioritized using comics as both concept art for the future slate of DC Studios but actually gave shout-outs to several comic runs, resulting in many comics selling out, let's hope this is the start of a trend rather than a one-off.