When it comes to naming the architect of the DCU in its original iteration, Zack Snyder tends to take the credit because that’s exactly what happened, but the contributions of Jay Olivia shouldn’t be overlooked.
The animation veteran is a regular collaborator of the Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Justice League director as it is, but his influence on Warner Bros. shared superhero sandbox – and even The CW’s dearly departed Arrowverse – runs much deeper than that.
During an interview with Inverse retrospectively celebrating the 10th anniversary of The Flashpoint Paradox, Olivia revealed that the bigwigs key to building and expanding the DCU on screens both big and small were using his work as the blueprint.
“Geoff Johns told me how they used my movies as a testbed to greenlight the live-action. So I did a Suicide Squad, it did good, and that led to the David Ayer and the James Gunn films. Later on, I did Flashpoint Paradox, and Geoff told me that he took the Flashpoint Paradox, and he recut it with all the Flash scenes and the Barry scenes and the emotional stuff. He showed that to the CW to say, Barry Allen can be a leading man.”
He’s one of the many people who hasn’t seen The Flash, though, admitting that nobody even contacted him about it despite his fingerprints being all over it. Olivia also weighed in on comic book fatigue, and his point is one that’s being echoed more and more as spandex-clad capers struggle in a way we haven’t seen for a long time.
“I think the audience is just tired of stories that are kind of the same. They want something that’s clever and executed well and doesn’t have an agenda. Just tell a good story, right?”
The multiverse is the shiny new toy in the superhero storytelling chest, but hopefully Olivia’s words are heeded directly or indirectly so we get more blockbusters like Spider-Man: No Way Home, and less like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Flash as a result.