The CW Boss Mark Pedowitz Talks Expanding Arrow/Flash Universe (TCA 2015)

[JamesG]

The CW’s Mark Pedowitz on Expanding Flash-Arrow Universe
by Nellie Andreeva
January 11, 2015


With DC Comic-based "Arrow" and "The Flash" doing so well, will the CW try to add another series to cross over with them?

“We are in preliminary discussions to expand the Flash-Arrow universe,” Pedowitz said, declining to elaborate further.

The creative team behind the two series later hinted that they are exploring a series based on the DC character Atom.

http://deadline.com/2015/01/flash-ar...cw-1201347209/

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http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/dc-c...ight-just-work

Could the worlds of Batman, Superman, The Flash, Shazak, Arrow and more all clash on the big screen? DC might just have that in mind...

With the news breaking recently that Ezra Miller had been cast in an upcoming The Flash movie as the Barry Allen version of the character (the very same incarnation played by Grant Gustin on TV’s The Flash), all hope was lost for the TV-meets-film crossover that audiences have been hoping for since Stephen Amell first won our hearts as Oliver Queen in Arrow.

Or was it? Multitudes of parallel universes, occasionally crossing over for huge multi-issue events, are hardly unheard of in the comic book world. In fact, they’ve been known to be iconic , fan pleasing, money making endeavours in the past. In the world of DC Comics, the term ‘crisis’ is often used to refer to a multi-universe crossover where shedloads of heroes unite to face a mammoth new threat – they are often landmark moments in comic book history.

Greatest of all DC’s crises, in this writer’s opinion, is Crisis On Infinite Earths, a 12 issue arc from 1985 penned by Marv Wolfman and drawn by George Pérez. Here’s the lowdown on what it’s all about and how – at a bit of a long shot – it could be the bombastic end-game for DC’s multi-universe world-building of the past few years.

What’s it all about?

Bear with me a little, here. The plot of Crisis On Infinite Earths is more than a little convoluted (as is expected with crossovers of such mammoth scale) and incredibly high-concept.

The main villain of the piece is an evil being called Anti-Monitor, who was created by the very same experiment that launched the DC Multiverse. In typical villain form, his goal is to conquer all reality (well, he technically wanted to ‘destroy all positive matter’ universes) and rule the remains for himself. Anti-Monitor’s goodie counterpart, Monitor, recruits some iconic heroes to try and save the day, attempting to protect vital ‘turning forks’ in history from the antimatter which is being used to destroy realities left and right.

After more villainy, some murders and a few sacrifices, only five universes remain. Thankfully, they’re where the core DC characters are based. These are combined into one Limbo Universe, in a final last-ditch plan to save them from Anti-Monitor. And this is when the fun really starts.

A group of heroes jump into Anti-Monitor’s world to stop him. They succeed in halting his initial plan, with Supergirl sacrificing her life in process. This initial victory causes a power-vacuum where Brainiac attempts to seize control of proceedings (killing an alternate-universe Luthor in the process).

Like all good villains, Anti-Monitor has a back-up plan though – an antimatter cannon. Soon, Barry Allen must sacrifice himself (there’s a lot of sacrificing) to put an end to this devastating weaponry. Of course, Anti-Monitor then reveals a third plan – to jump back to the dawn of time and stop the Multiverse from ever being created.

While the heroes go to stop him, the villains – united to save the universe – jump to a different point in time to halt the invention of Anti-Monitor’s snazzy arsenal of technology. They fail to stop the vital experiment though, and the Multiverse is plunged into doom and despair.

Powered by the magical heroes of various Earths, omnipotent immortal superhero Spectre battles the big bad on a huge scale, resulting in the remaining Earths being fused together. Once here, only the heroes who travelled to the dawn of time can remember pre-crisis events.

Then the final showdown occurs, with a parallel world Superman and Lois, the original Superboy and a parallel Alexander Luthor (a heroic son of Lex) taking the brunt of the fight and eventually stopping the now gigantic Anti-Monitor, with the unlikely aid of the villainous Darkseid, before being whisked off into a parallel dimension.

As I mentioned, it’s more than a little wacky. There are plenty of strong elements here though, which could – at a bit of a long shot – be on a few meeting agendas over at Warner Bros. HQ.

How could that possibly fit in with the current slate?

What’s bigger than an Avengers sized team-up? Well, a multi-universe ‘crisis’ would certainly fit that description. It would undoubtedly be an amazing rug-pull moment for the cinema-going sceptics of this world if DC – often criticised for trying to hurriedly ape the ‘Marvel model’ – was actually working on something far bigger all along.

It’s worth remembering that, in a similar vein to how ‘Avengers assemble!’ was a very familiar phrase for Marvel comics’ fans years before the movie version, ‘crisis’ is a term with equally huge ramifications in the DC world. If pulled off correctly, a whopping universe-mashing crossover could well be one of the more ambitious movies of recent time.

And while Crisis On Infinite Earths is arguably the most off-the-wall of all crises, it is undeniably a bankable, respectable name among comic book fans, not unlike Days Of Future Past. The last X-Men film fared incredibly well on the whole with mainstream cinema goers, comic book readers, film critics and box office bean-counters alike.

To draw another comparison to Days Of Future Past, we wouldn’t expect a film version of Crisis On Infinite Earths to stick strictly to the source material. Instead, the overarching structure, some plot beats, character inclusions and developmental moments are what we would expect to see.

Firstly, the idea of pooling previously separate universes could work wonderfully for Warner Bros. After all, its main cinematic universe is soon to grow exponentially with Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice, Suicide Squad, two Justice League films and touted solo films for Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, Green Lantern, The Flash and Aquaman. There are clearly more than enough heroes there to fill the core plot of Crisis On Infinite Earths.

Just as Earth-2 and Earth-3, Earth X and Earth-AD made up the numbers in the Crisis On Infinite Earths comic book run, The CW Arrow/The Flash universe, Bruno Heller’s Gotham-verse, the touted separate universe of Shazam! and the potential standalone world of the much discussed Supergirl series could provide plenty of supporting characters to give a Crisis On Infinite Earths film a necessary gigantic sense of scope. Heck, Constantine characters or any former DC actors from decades past could make cameos, too.

With Arrow’s Suicide Squad, and the cast alongside the upcoming movie version, as well as all the baddies from the standalone films, Warner Bros will also easily have a big enough selection of villains to supply a team of baddies-gone-good to fulfil that side of the equation, too, in a few years.

With that cast, and to truly be a Crisis On Infinite Earths film, Warner Bros. would need a threat big enough to put all of reality in danger. If Monitor and Anti-Monitor are deemed too strange for mainstream consumption, Darkseid (or another galactically enabled villain) could surely fill the gap.

Said villain would need a plot so dastardly that Superman and co need to use whizzy science stuff to combine all these universes and attempt to stop the threat together with the other heroes of the Multiverse. While more ground-level heroes like Stephen Amell’s The Arrow and the entire cast of Gotham would probably be relegated to tidying up debris and helping caught-in-the-crossfire civilians, both Grant Gustin’s The Flash, other meta-humans from his show and the forthcoming small-screen Supergirl could definitely help out the bigger heroes.

In fact, both The Flash and Supergirl play a key role in the comics - Barry Allen is actually one of the first characters to jump through time-streams, popping back in his own universe’s history to warn Batman of the crisis ahead, while both he and Supergirl later make some of the biggest sacrifices in the whole story.

With two Barry Allens, Bruce Waynes and even Suicide Squads set to be established by Warner Bros, there would also be enough instances of characters bumping into themselves for this to seem like a ‘realistic’ multi-universe story. Just the chance to see David Mazouz’ Bruce glimpsing Batfleck grappling through a parallel Gotham City is enough to make us desire this film into existing.

All in all, if a film adaptation of Crisis On Infinite Earths could tie together the separate DC universes for a galactically-sized battle for survival, the result could be one of the most star-studded superhero movies of all time. It would certainly be a way for DC to step out of Marvel’s shadow, too.

Will it ever happen?

Okay, let’s take a reality check here. What we’ve just outlined is a film that, if sticking to the structure of the source material, would take all of Warner Bros.’ hard work to establish a string of separate, profitable universes… and then blow it all up in favour of one overly-populated world.

We’re also talking about TV networks, film studios and countless huge egos having to agree on a shared vision, which could be a tough one. Additionally, this would be one of the most expensive films ever made, and one of the toughest juggling acts ever to grace scriptwriting history.

However, rather than lamenting that Amell, Gustin and co have been left out of the main DC cinematic universe, it’s interesting to consider why they might have been kept separate. Arguably more so than with Marvel, parallel worlds are a key element of DC comic book history.

While they’re not exactly the bread and butter of the DC universe (that would be dead parents and secret identities, surely), universe-hopping narratives are certainly a regular treat for DC readers – a particularly fancy condiment which you use on special occasions, perhaps, if we must keep up the ‘things that go on bread’ metaphor.

If the comic book movie bubble manages not to burst as DC works through its slate of films (which currently wraps up with Green Lantern in 2020), I wouldn’t be entirely shocked if Warner Bros did think of pulling together some form of ‘crisis’ as its next step. As I've stated, it'd have to simplify and alter the source material, though. There’s no reason it couldn’t change the ending and leave the separate worlds intact afterwards, either.

One final thought: The Flash’s pilot episode ended with a future newspaper proclaiming ‘Flash Missing – Vanishes In Crisis,’ dated April 25 2024. That could be interpreted any number of ways (the Flashpoint arc is a popular bet), but just imagine for a second that it’s a tease for a 2024 Crisis On Infinite Earths crossover event... I'm going to go sit in the corner and breathe into a bag now.

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