In the trailer, Barry going back in time results in severe changes to his reality, including there being no metahumans, and somehow Michael Shannon’s Zod is back. The only people Flash can call for help are a pair of Batmans, and an imprisoned Supergirl (though we don’t yet know if this will be the same Supergirl from “Woman of Tomorrow”), in what looks like the equivalent of Superman’s role in the comic.
That comic is “Flashpoint,” a game-changing, company-wide crossover event mini-series that mostly existed as a lead-in for The New 52, which reset the status quo of the DC Universe and radically changed every character.
Being a company-wide crossover event, virtually every major character in the whole DC Universe had a role to play in “Flashpoint,” with tons of tie-in titles, in addition to the core miniseries helping paint an expansive picture that truly felt important and apocalyptic. It had serious repercussions for each character, even before you get to the New 52 reset, and there were conflicts that involved dozens if not hundreds of heroes, starting with a world war involving Themiscyra and Atlantis.
By comparison, the trailer for “The Flash” feels like the movie will have about the same scale as the disaster of The CW show of the same name, only with a much bigger budget. The idea of a world without heroes is interesting, but that we are still getting a handful of heroes — only a handful — is a cop-out, like “Captain America: Civil War” barely reaching a dozen characters. In both cases, the reasoning seems to be a desire to focus on the titular character rather than a team-up spectacle, but to have the first Flash movie still be more of a DC-wide event, and then remove a lot of what made it a cool DC-wide event, is a waste.