Ezra Miller Won’t Be Replaced As the Flash

For a guy who plays a superhero, Ezra Miller has a bad habit of getting into trouble with the law. In recent months he’s had more than one run-in with police, along with some other behavior that’s generated a slew of negative headlines. The star of Justice League and the upcoming The Flash has been arrested twice in Hawaii this year for two different altercations. Not long before that, there was a bizarre situation where Miller seemingly threatened a local branch of the Ku Klux Klan on his personal Instagram account.

The negative attention has been so consistent that some DC Comics fans have begun wondering whether Miller might lose his job playing the Flash altogether. Hollywood studios are allergic to controversy, and their appetite for dealing with unpredictable stars is even more diminished in the case of a movie like The Flash, which cost an enormous amount of money to produce and needs to draw huge audiences of families in order to turn a profit.

On the other hand, the massive amount of money Warner Bros. has already invested in The Flash might mean Miller’s job is safe at least for now. According to a new report in Variety, The Flash remains one of the studio’s highest-profile projects in 2023 “barring unforeseen developments.”

As for whether Miller remains the Flash, they say it would be next to impossible to replace him in The Flash because the film has already long since finished shooting, and because his character is so central to the story. Movies that have fully replaced controversial stars — as when Ridley Scott reshot Kevin Spacey’s part in All the Money in the World with Christopher Plummer following Spacey’s own legal troubles — generally only did so with minor supporting roles, not title characters. As Variety puts it…

With “The Flash,” insiders say it would not be possible to replace Miller without reshooting the entire movie. They are in just about every scene, and there is not enough digital technology in existence to configure that magic without going back to square one. And redoing the entire film is not a realistic proposition for any movie — much less one that wrapped production months ago and already cost hundreds of millions.

In other words, it would take an enormous amount of bad behavior to get Miller replaced on The Flash because he is the Flash. For now, Warner Bros. is stuck with Miller, at least barring more of those aforementioned “unforeseen circumstances.”

The good news in all of this: Per Variety, The Flash is playing “extraordinarily well” in early test screenings. We’ll see whether real-world events necessitate any changes to the movie between now and when it’s scheduled to open in theaters on June 23, 2023.