Despite meeting a grisly end in Man of Steel, it looks like Michael Shannon’s iteration of Zod may not be over, with multiple sources revealing that preview footage from The Flash movie shown during Warner Bros’ presentation at CinemaCon depicted the villain making a surprise return.
General Zod, Superman’s arch-nemesis, first appeared in the DCEU in 2013 opposite Henry Cavill in the Zack Snyder-directed Man of Steel. Although the tyrannical Kryptonian warlord was defeated by the end of the thriller, there are a couple of ways he could feasibly make a re-appearance in Ezra Miller’s first (and probably last) DCEU movie as Barry Allen.
Firstly, it has been established that The Flash movie, which is being directed by Andrés Muschietti, will involve an element of time travel. So, it makes sense that Barry might end up travelling to a time before Zod ends up going head to head with Superman and meeting his fate. There’s also the theory that the General Zod we see in this movie isn’t the exact same one as we saw in the 2013 action movie. Instead, it could be he is the General Zod that exists within the same universe as Batman actor Michael Keaton, — it’s just that this General Zod looks suspiciously similar to Michael Shannon.
The truth is, with time travel and alternate universes both making up a core component of The Flash’s plot, there are endless possibilities for how they can explain his re-appearance.
After Ezra Miller was arrested twice in Hawaii over spring, there were concerns that The Flash movie, which has already been pushed back to summer 2023, may face further delays or even be shelved. Although Warner Bros hasn’t commented directly on this matter, the studio’s enthusiastic previewing of more titbits from The Flash movie suggests that the adventure movie is still on track for its scheduled release of June 23, 2023.
Meanwhile, if you want to revisit General Zod’s story, you can watch Man of Steel on Amazon Prime Video, which you can subscribe to here.