Arrow Showrunner Confesses “Miscalculation” on Team Arrow Fight
Arrow co-showrunner Marc Guggenheim confessed to TVLine that he might have miscalculated the reaction to Season 6’s Civil War-style storyline.
I think if I miscalculated anywhere, it’s probably on the order of not taking into full consideration the fact that while all the arguments may be equal and equally strong, there’s always going to be a love and affection for the original characters that the new characters don’t get a chance to enjoy.
In crafting these arguments, we were being, I think, very evenhanded. At least we were trying to be. But we were not taking into account the familiarity factor.
Superheroes having a falling out and fighting amongst each other is one of the most longstanding comic book traditions. Again, this is maybe where we miscalculated, but I always assumed the fans would go along with us in this regard, because it is such a tried-and-true comic book [convention].
Evoking the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Captain America: Civil War, Guggenheim went on to say, “In the Marvel cinematic universe, very good movies have been made about [infighting].”
The thing I always ask, or I think any showrunner would ask, is: We’re basically in the middle of the story, so try to try to withhold judgment until you see how the story resolves itself.
Arrow airs Thursdays @ 9pm ET on The CW.
H/T: TVLine
Arrow Star Stephen Amell Believes Black Lightning Crossover Will “Eventually” Happen
New CW hit Black Lightning hasn’t officially joined the Arrowverse just yet, but Arrow star Stephen Amell believes that’s just a small technicality.
Amell was recently asked about the crossover potential and here’s what he had to say:
Everyone pretends like we’re not going to eventually cross over with Black Lightning but we’re probably gonna cross over with Black Lightning because that’s just the way that the world works… I think that anything you can do to expand the universe and to build out what we’ve built on our show would be great. So, I’m glad that show’s doing well, I hope that it has a very successful run, and I would love to be a small part of it in some way shape, or form.
H/T: ComicBookMovie
Legends of Tomorrow Co-Showrunner Discusses Season Finale: “The Good, The Bad and The Cuddly”
Monday’s season finale episode of Legends of Tomorrow is going to feature a major showdown, as the Legends face off against Mallus and a number of fan favorite characters return for the main event.
Legends co-showrunner Phil Klemmer was interviewed by TVLine, and he gave a preview of the season finale which includes a former team member’s return and some possible good-byes.
Here are some of the most important questions asked / answered:
In his true form, what are Mallus’ powers besides looking damn intimidating? Does he breathe fire…?
He’s, like, a fire-hurling, flying demon. His greatest power, though, is chewing through visual effects money. His one superpower is that every moment he’s on screen, you can imagine a pile of cash turning into smoke.
What is his agenda? What does he “want” most in the world?
He is a sort of bellwether of bad guys to come in Season 4. Up until this point, we’ve been dealing with earthly and historical bad guys, and we certainly had fun with all of that, but this year we dabbled in the world of the occult, through Damien Darhk and his enterprises. But you know that Constantine is coming onto the show [as a regular] next season, so we want to go deeper, we want Mallus to be used as “the tip of the iceberg.” He is not human, and we want to start playing with the idea that Earth hasn’t always belonged just to our kind.
We want to get into the world of fantastic myths and monsters a bit more. It’s kind of presumptuous for anybody to think they have ownership of this Earth or any part of it. Not to get deep into immigration metaphors, but Mallus is an ancient evil, he doesn’t understand humans and doesn’t understand why we have any claim to controlling this world of ours.
New photos reveal that Franz Drameh is back for the finale, as Jax. What do you want to say about that encore?
You might have noticed that we’ve included a number of family members of our regular cast on the show as guest stars — like Brandon Routh’s wife Courtney Ford in the role of Nora Darhk, and the guest appearance of Maisie Richardson-Sellers’ mother Joy Richardson as Amaya’s vision quest ancestor. So if you look very closely, you’ll notice that the finale doesn’t just include Franz Drameh but a brief cameo of someone related to him.
The Jax we meet in the finale isn’t the same one who left our team a matter of months ago — he has been inspired by what he learned from his friend and mentor Martin Stein. Being a time traveler is like living in Neverland, where you never have to grow up, and having Jax return to our show after a stint in the real world is a bittersweet reminder of what his friends and former teammates are missing. When we started this show three years ago, we never would have guessed that the youngest Legend would be the first to “grow up,” or that the guy that had to be tricked into joining the team would be the one to answer the Legends’ call in their hour of need.
OK, the big question I have been building up to: Will we see Beebo again? The finale title does have the word “cuddly” in it.
And he is a very cuddly guy. I will say this: Once you’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in CGI assets, it’s a shame to only use them once. That’s why you see Grodd [on a recurring basis] — we finally figured out how to do this really well, so we have to do it again! So keep your eye open for Beebo, for sure.
Because you’ve promoted both Matt Ryan (Constantine) and Jes Macallan (Ava) as regulars for next season, does the finale pave way for any exits?
It does, it does. There’s heartbreak in the finale. A Legend leaves.
It could be argued that Amaya’s story, for one, has come full circle.
As far as her and Nate, I don’t know if love is made to last in the world of the Legends.
But at least one seat will be freed up aboard the Waverider itself…?
Yeah, yeah.
D.C.’s Legends of Tomorrow airs its Season 3 finale on Monday @ 8pm ET on The CW.
H/T: TVLine
Caity Lotz Returns to Arrow for Season Finale
Legends of Tomorrow star Caity Lotz’s Sara Lance will return home in present-day Star City during Arrow‘s season finale, airing Thursday, May 17. Lotz herself IGed the news.
Lotz last appeared on Arrow (in a non-crossover episode) in November 2015, not long before the Legends spinoff made its series premiere.
No further information on exactly what Sara will be up to in the season finale has been released.
H/T: Collider
![Arrow Showrunner Discusses [SPOILER]’s Exit](https://www.papichuloradio.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Oliver-and-Thea-Queen-680x330.jpg)
Arrow Showrunner Discusses [SPOILER]’s Exit
This past Thursday, The CW’s Arrow said farewell to OG castmember Willa Holland. Speedy sped away in a red car with Roy Harper and Nyssa al Ghul to track down / destroy three Lazarus Pits that her father, Malcolm Merlyn, had discovered at some point prior to his death.
Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim sat down with TVLine to discuss Holland’s exit. Here are a few excerpts from the interview.
How long has this been in motion, the plan to write out Willa?
By the end of Season 4, Willa had expressed a desire to reduce her episodic commitment to the show and that was sort of done in sort of conjunction with an indication that it was likely that she wouldn’t want to renew her contract past Season 6. So, we’ve kind of known for a while that this was in the offing. We revisited it with Willa at the beginning of Season 6, and she indicated that she hadn’t changed her mind, that she was still interested in moving on.
We talked about some requests she had for us in terms of how her episodes would be utilized and grouped, and at what point in the season she would be written out, and we accommodated her on all those fronts because, look, at the end of the day we love Willa and we love working with her. She’s done right by us and so we wanted to do right by her.
It’s my understanding that part of what made it difficult for you, in considering her wish, was removing this important part of Oliver’s family.
That’s the thing. Apart from not getting a chance to work with Willa, that was probably the most painful aspect of it, because when we adapted the Green Arrow comic to live-action, one of the earliest and the biggest changes we made from the comic was to give Oliver a family. In the comic, he didn’t have siblings and his parents were both dead. This was a significant relationship for him and also, I think, one of the most effective elements of the show. The relationship between Stephen and Willa on camera was wonderful. But though we went into the season knowing that he’d be losing this relationship, we also knew he’d be—
Gaining a wife, gaining a son.
He’d be gaining a wife. He’d be gaining a son. And while we would do our best not to replace the relationship with Thea, we wanted to maintain a family element in his life.
Was it all that Colton Haynes needed to hear, that he was coming back for Willa’s sendoff, to get him to sign on for another encore?
Actually, it’s funny — no. I had bumped into Colton on the Fox lot months earlier and we started talking and he expressed a desire to come back to the show, because he had a window of free time. I was like, “Actually, that works out great!” It worked out really, really well because we always knew that in a perfect world, Thea’s departure from the show would involve Roy in some way. Roy’s been such a big part of her story that [Colton’s return] was a fortuitous circumstance.
Arrow airs Thursdays @ 9pm ET on The CW.
H/T: TVLine
Two-Night Arrowverse Crossover Announced
The CW has announced that the 2017-2018 television season’s Arrowverse crossover event will take place over two nights at the Television Critics Association summer press tour.
The crossover event beings Monday, November 27 on Supergirl, followed by a special Monday episode of Arrow. The crossover continues Tuesday, November 28 on The Flash, then concludes on that night’s DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.
CW boss Mark Pedowitz said that with The Flash and Legends already paired up on Tuesdays — and after discussions with producers and the marketing department — “We felt that it would be better and tighter in storytelling…. This was the best way to go.”
“Next year we may go back to four nights,” he allowed.
Pedowitz also made clear that unlike last year’s event, which technically started but barely took place on Supergirl, “It’s a full, four-episode crossover.” As for how one tops an alien invasion as a premise for the all-star team-up, all he would say is, “Romance is in the air.”
The Arrowverse’s very first crossover took place in December 2014 and started on The Flash and concluded on Arrow. In December 2015, Legends of Tomorrow villain Vandal Savage targeted Central City barista Kendra Saunders, triggering the involvement of Flash and Arrow heroes. Last year’s four-show, three-night event included Supergirl, as the many Superfriends battled the alien race known as The Dominators.
Black Lightning‘s Location Confirmed
While The CW’s latest superhero series Black Lightning might not be set in the Arrowverse (yet), we do have confirmation on the actual city location of the new series.
Black Lightning will be set in Freeland, a fictional city. The television series is filming in Atlanta.
Developed by executive producers Salim and Mara Brock Akil, alongside Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schechter, Black Lightning will showcase battles that are even more grounded in social justice than when Jefferson Pierce debuted as one of DC’s first African-American heroes in 1977.
Topics tackled by the series will include Black Lives Matter, race relations and police brutality. “This is an American story, this is not a black story… We’re going to be culturally specific, but universal in our themes so everyone can see themselves in these stories,” said Salim Akil in an EW interview.
In the interview they also discussed if crossovers with other CW DC series could occur.
One of the things that Black Lightning will do, and Jefferson will do, is be able to introduce the humanity of the people who are caught in these communities. So I didn’t want to distract from that, and I didn’t want to distract from us getting to know Jefferson, Jennifer, and Anissa, or Black Lightning, Thunder, and Lightning. I wanted people to get to know them first.
Now, you know, everything is possible. But hopefully this season everybody will just get to know them and get to respect them and accept them for who they are before we start making other moves.
But will there be crossover potential?
Yeah, I’m not opposed to it at all.
Black Lightning premieres in 2018.