It seems like such a simple question, bordering on so, so stupid: Is the Michael Keaton Batman from The Flash the same Michael Keaton Batman that’s in the Michael Keaton Batman? He dresses like the Michael Keaton Batman. He drives the same car as the Michael Keaton Batman. He’s played by Michael Keaton and says lines from Batman like “let’s get nuts” and “I’m Michael Keaton, and I’m portraying troubled billionaire Bruce Wayne, alias Batman, as I did twice before in Batman and Batman Returns and would have once more in Batgirl had it not been for studio intervention.” I used to have that one on a lunchbox.
And yet denizens of the internet suspect that something peculiar is afoot. That the Michael Keaton Batman of Michael Keaton’s Batman is a different Michael Keaton Batman than the one in The Flash. It’s the sort of thing that makes you want to pull your hair out or scream real loud or go back in time and figure out how to play sports as a kid so you won’t spend your entire adult life entrenched in the minutia of message board fan theories and gutless movie studios willing to tie their own spines into knots bending to audience whims.
But I digress.
The theory, according to the less frustratable minds over on Reddit’s r/dc_cinematic board, is that the Michael Keaton Batman of The Flash exists in a “clone universe” – one functionally indistinguishable from the universe of the Tim Burton movies, the one labeled “Earth-89.” Basically, the idea goes that this universe experienced all the same events as the universe seen in the Burton movies, then split off at some point and became the one where Michael Keaton Batman teams up with Ezra Miller, leaving the original Michael Keaton Batman universe pristine and untouched and just the way you imagine it in your Danny Elfman-scored dreams.
The major upside to this, of course, is that it leaves the BurtonVerse immaculate, ready for, say, another in a long line of decades-late pseudo-sequels that ignore the entries in the series that nobody liked, a la the famously successful Superman Returns, Terminator: Dark Fate, and like, every other Halloween movie at this point.
Does the theory hold water? Not at all. The Flash director Andrés Muschietti has never made any assertion that the Michael Keaton Batman in his movie is anything other than the Michael Keaton Batman of the previous Michael Keaton Batman movies. Terabytes of footage were shot, tying The Flash’s Michael Keaton Batman to his previous adventures fighting the Jack Nicholson Joker and so forth. There is literally no reason to believe that this is a different Michael Keaton Batman.
That said, if it bothers you, absolutely tweet about it. Warner Bros. became the kid on the playground that’ll eat a frog if you yell at him enough the second they said “Alright, fine, here’s the Snyder Cut.” You can probably convince them to change the canon if you make them believe it’ll get you to pay for a movie ticket.