A pivotal Flash scene in Zack Snyder’s Justice League sets the stage for an even more epic time travel sequence in a future DC movie. The long-awaited Snyder Cut confirms that Barry Allen’s powers aren’t limited to dodging bullets and pushing people out of danger: Much like the comics, the DCEU’s Fastest Man Alive can run fast enough to travel through time. Though it’s doubtful that Justice League 2 will ever materialize, Zack Snyder laid the groundwork for a sequel to show Barry going where he’s never gone before onscreen.
The Snyder Cut's climactic final battle sees the team fighting Steppenwolf and his army of Parademons, while Victor attempts to disable the Mother Boxes. Despite the timely arrival of a reborn Superman, the heroes fail to stop the Unity and the Boxes link together, causing a massive explosion that nearly kills the entire League. However, the Flash is able to enter the Speed Force and reverse time, giving the team another chance to separate the Unity and kill Steppenwolf. It’s one of the most visually stunning moments in the film, with lightning bolts flashing around Barry as the world slows down and the shattered bodies of his teammates are restored.
If the Flash gets another opportunity to race through time in a future Justice League sequel, there’s a significant chance he’ll be running full-speed through the vacuum of space. The scene when an older version of Barry appears with a dire warning for Bruce in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice implies (and Zack Snyder has confirmed) that Batman and Cyborg built the Cosmic Treadmill in the Batcave sometime after the events of Justice League. The device gives Flash a means of traveling back to a specific point in time while remaining in a fixed physical location. Victor and Bruce would have built the Treadmill to avoid the possibility of Barry ending up somewhere off-world, so Snyder may have been planning a scene where he does exactly that, prompting the other big brains of the League to come up with a way to make sure Barry lands on target.
Snyder offered another hint at this star-crossing time travel scene in the "Mother Box Origins" trailer that dropped in February 2021. The clip shows reliefs of the six Justice League members on different sides of a drifting Mother Box, each surrounded by objects and moments from their respective origin stories. Bruce’s side of the box shows nods to his origin story, while Diana is surrounded by objects reminiscent of her time fighting in World War I. Barry appears amidst a series of stars and planets, with a sundial floating overhead and a collection of clockwork gears scattered behind him. This is a not-so-subtle nod to his ability to run through time by entering the Speed Force, but it might also hint at the potential scene when Flash quite literally rewinds time and space, with entire galaxies wheeling around him as he travels the space between worlds.
With Ezra Miller’s The Flash movie set to drop sometime next year, it’s evident that a more deeply characterized Barry Allen will appear in the DCEU's future. It’s unclear whether the space travel setup in Zack Snyder’s Justice League will come to fruition, but it would certainly make for an epic moment with the Flash showing the full potential of his time-bending abilities.
