Even though the awesomeness that was Crisis on Earth-X is still fresh in our memory, many of us have been left pondering what the fifth attempt at an Arrowverse mashup will bring next season. After all, our heroes have already had to contend with the likes of Vandal Savage, the Dominators and Nazi doppelgangers from a parallel universe, so what else could the future possibly hold?
Personally, I’d like to see them bring in Darkseid because, let’s face it, it’s highly doubtful that we’ll ever see him in a movie now that Justice League bombed at the box office. Seriously, with him having such a history with Kryptonians in other forms of media, it’d be cool to see the producers of these shows borrow from the work of Jeph Loeb and Michael Turner, thus allowing the Lord of Apokolips to corrupt Supergirl.
But much like the creative minds themselves, we can’t get too ahead of ourselves. Still, that doesn’t mean Marc Guggenheim and company haven’t begun musing on the subject, as he had this to offer when speaking at ACE Comic Con in Phoenix:
“We always sort of talk about it… I always say, the crossover is a really difficult labor. It’s like going into the room of a woman who just gave birth and she’s still swaddling her newborn and you ask ‘so how about the next one?’ At the same time, we’ve had discussions.
“We know that the crossovers are a fact of life. I do think that there’s a big desire on the part of all of us, as well as the studio and the network, to do the crossover differently than we did this past year. In part because I honestly don’t know how we top it. And also because the level of ambition was so high that it affects a lot of different things. It affects schedules, it affects casts, it affects budgets.”
Quite naturally, he and his colleagues have been “thinking outside the box,” but “What that is, I have no idea. None of us really know.” Either way, they may have a daunting task ahead of them, especially with Black Lightning now being a part of The CW’s prime time lineup.
“My preference actually would be to start talking about it sooner rather than later. Because it really is like doing — I know there’s now five shows along with Black Lightning, that’s not to say that Black Lightning is a part of the Arrowverse, that’s above my pay grade — but I will say whether you consider it four shows or five shows, doing the crossover is like doing a fifth or sixth show. And getting out as far ahead of it as possible is always good.”
While it has been made clear that Black Lightning isn’t part of the Arrowverse – at least for the time being – nobody can really speak of the possibilities that next season could bring. After all, Arrow itself was originally conceived as existing in a universe where superpowers don’t exist, and that notion was thrown out the window by the time its sophomore year came around.