The battle between Justice League star Ray Fisher and DC Films president Walter Hamada has hit another…What, peak? Nadir? Hypnotic bump of conflict? Take your pick tonight, as Fisher announced that he’s formally been removed from a planned appearance as Victor “Cyborg” Stone in Andy Muschietti’s long-gestating Flash movie. This comes, not entirely unpredictably, after a statement Fisher made late last year, in which he stated that he would refuse to work on any movie Hamada produced, and Hamada’s still firmly ensconced at DC Films, so…Yeah.
In a long and passionate Twitter post, Fisher laid out his issues with Hamada in his clearest language to date, accusing him, in a phone call back in June, of deliberately ignoring and trying to downplay issues the actor had with former DC Films head Geoff Johns, who Fisher has accused, alongside producer Jon Berg and director Joss Whedon, of racist and abusive behavior during the filming of Justice League. This phone call—which also included, in Fisher’s description, a “tastelessly self-aware joke” about Hamada hoping not to end up on Fisher’s Twitter—appears to have been the origins of Fisher’s later claims that Hamada had happily “thrown [Whedon and Berg] under the bus” in favor of Johns, which was itself pushed back hard on by a Warner Bros. statement in September.
Admittedly, most of the above is old news in this long and frequently infuriatingly vague story. Here’s where things get a bit juicier, though: Fisher goes on to accuse Hamada of deliberately covering up Johns’ behavior, including accusations of tampering with the long-gestating third-party investigation of the movie’s filming, which concluded last month, but which we in the public haven’t been privy to the details of. In his statement, Fisher—who supposedly has seen the investigation’s conclusions—claims that the investigation “was able to expose the racist, coercive, discriminatory, and retaliatory behavior of Geoff Johns during his tenure with WarnerMedia’s affiliates,” as well as claiming that it “led to the more immediate parting of ways between WarnerMedia and Joss Whedon.” Again, we haven’t seen any of the investigation’s results—all we got at the time was WarnerMedia noting that “remedial action” had been taken—but the timeline does loosely map to Whedon abruptly departing his HBO Max series The Nevers back in late November of 2020.
Fisher ends his statement by dubbing Hamada “unfit for leadership,” and declaring himself willing to take a polygraph to back up any of his claims. WarnerMedia and DC Films haven’t responded so far—or even confirmed, as of yet, that Fisher is out of the film, although they’d reportedly been working on plans to write him out of The Flash for a while now.