Why The Flash Used YouTube Footage To Resurrect DC's Fallen Heroes - Did It Work?

Even if you haven't seen "The Flash" (and judging by the film's dismal box office performance, you wouldn't be alone in that by any stretch), you probably know that Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) is far from the only superhero in it. The film's advertising campaign leaned heavily on the return of Michael Keaton to the role of Bruce Wayne, better known as Batman, while Ben Affleck's version of the Caped Crusader, as well as Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman and Sasha Calle's Supergirl, make appearances as well.

Furthermore, "The Flash" includes several other superhero cameos from past screen portrayals of characters like Superman and Batman, visible during the "Chrono Bowl" sequence when the Scarlet Speedster sprints across the multiverse. Supermen played by George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, and Nicolas Cage make brief CGI appearances, as does Adam West's Batman. According to supervising sound editor Nancy Nugent, as quoted in ScreenRant, some of the material for these scenes came from a surprising source: YouTube.

"I'll tell you the truth; a lot of [the cameos in "The Flash"] were pulled from YouTube. [We were] finding those old clips, and then it was a matter of removing music if there was music tied to it, or just cleaning it up," Nancy Nugent told ScreenRant. "Really, it was just a matter of finding out what we were legally allowed to use: which properties, and whose voices, and all of that, and then finding it on the internet and cleaning it up."

As a member of the sound team for "The Flash," Nugent is likely referring to audio snippets from past DC Comics adaptations heard in the movie, like Adam West's voice. But it's also possible that the filmmakers used footage from YouTube to craft the CGI models seen in the movie.

Did it work? It did in the sense that the concept of the multiverse was rendered on screen, but whether the CGI cameos have any lasting emotional impact on the viewer is obviously a subjective matter. Given that "The Flash" is now officially a box office bomb, you could certainly make the argument that most viewers don't care about the cameos. Then again, they take up so little screen time that they might not make too much of a difference in the film's performance either way. However, it's interesting to think that some of the material to make them came not from some comprehensive Warner Bros. vault but from our real-life multiverse: YouTube.