Stephen Amell has revealed that there were once plans for a movie version of Arrow, but it was “killed” by Warner Bros. The series was among the top performing shows on The CW at the height of its scripted show years, and it remains so now. In an interview with Michael Rosenbaum on his Inside of You podcast, Amell obviously ended up discussing the series, and Rosenbaum broached the subject of a possible revival of the show.
“I mean I joked about it, because I think that it would be wonderful one these days to go back and do something that was in a medium where I could break bones and drop an F-bomb and just sort of go the ‘hard R’ [rating] version of Arrow.”
While it seems like this is the kind of project that would certainly be a huge hit, the likelihood of it happening is slim with the current roster of DC projects coming in the next few years. This is particularly hard for Amell, considering his next revelation that there was a movie in contention at one time.
To my understanding it just got killed at the studio level from people that, I think, were making decisions…that were fear-based.
Obviously, the Arrowverse has almost completely been disbanded now. Although the DC franchise was once the jewel in the crown of The CW, one by one the many TV shows have dwindled away until the cancelation of The Flash in 2023 brought it to a close. It seems hard to imagine a scenario when any revival or continuation would happen anytime in the future.
The Arrowverse Saved The CW
The CW may have boasted several popular scripted shows like Gossip Girl and The Vampire Diaries, the network was not overly successful in many other areas, and the debut of Arrow in 2012 was a pivotal moment in The CW’s history. As executive producer Marc Guggenheim recently told The Showrunner Whisperer podcast, the success of Arrow was the only thing that could save The CW – and it did just that. He said:
“Shortly after the pilot got ordered to series, Peter Roth [president of Warner Bros. TV] took us out to lunch and basically laid out for us, in incredible detail, the reality that if Arrow wasn’t a hit, there would be no more CW. So it was the pressure of having a show and keeping the show on the air – that’s one thing – but now we also have the pressure of keeping the whole network on the air. That’s another thing.”
While Arrow and the subsequent DC shows that accompanied it proved very lucrative, The CW’s recent changes have seen not only the Arrowverse, but many other scripted series being shut down by new investors Nexstar as they looked to streamline costs and start turning a profit from the network. If anything, this has made it seem almost impossible to believe that there is anyone currently considering picking up the threads of Arrow and pulling them together in the form of a new movie.
Arrow
is currently streaming on Netflix.