Arrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim has changed his mind about having superpowers on the more grounded series after the crossover with The Flash.
Guggenheim, up until this point, has been opposed to the idea of having characters with powers — or metahumans, as they’re called on sister series The Flash — on Arrow.
He stated in September that the series wasn’t “really planning on revisiting superpowers or enhanced abilities during season three.” Rather, the series would be “returning to the show’s roots of a very grounded world where it’s very realistic” and “pretty well and truly grounded in real-life things and real-life science.”
And, in early October, when asked about Ray Palmer’s potential to utilize his comic book counterpart’s shrinking powers, he stated, “With The Flash in existence, there’s no real compelling reason for us to do superpowers on Arrow, because we can bring characters to Flash to have superpowers.”
However, the upcoming Flash/Arrow crossover has changed his tune. “What’s fun about episode 8 for Arrow is it proved to me, as a writer and a producer, hey, you know what? You can do metahumans on Arrow without feeling like the show is changing its tone too much,” he says.
So, will we be seeing more metahumans on Arrow with a particle accelerator giving people like Barry Allen powers in Central City? “It’s something that we all sort of collectively realized — hey, the show can handle that. So that’s kind of cool,” Guggenheim explains. “I might have to amend my earlier comment from the beginning of the year, just because this kind of works.”
Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8:00 p.m. ET on The CW.