No, Green Lantern, Nightwing and Ethan Hawke Will Likely Not Be On Arrow This Year

The IMDb page for The CW's Arrow is kind of hilarious right now.

As of this writing, the entry for Season Four's premiere, titled "Green Arrow," features guest appearances by Hal "Green Lantern" Jordan, Carol "Star Sapphire" Ferris, Dick "Nightwing" Grayson and...Ethan Hawke?!

UPDATE, July 26, 2015, 8 P.M. ET: When provided with this information, Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim said, "That's not true. At all. You can quote me." So...that seems to be that for this absurd rumor. Assuming, of course, the Internet doesn't continue to keep it alive for some reason.

Well, probably whoever posted that meant to say Connor Hawke, Oliver Queen's son from the comics who is rumored to be appearing in this season of the TV show. Still, given the utter absurdity of this entry, we kind of want to believe that somebody just said "Hell with it. That guy from Before Sunrise is in it, too. But as a character, not the actor himself."

Most fans know by now that IMDb, like Wikipedia, is user-edited and basically anybody can put basically anything into an entry. However, it has fewer active users than Wikipedia, and fewer who would consider themselves expert enough to remove even a fairly-obviously-wrong "rumored" entry. And given its standing as an authority for most fans, this can occasionally lead to misunderstandings as to what information is and is not genuine.

One memorable instance "revealed" Cobie Smulders' character in Marvel's The Avengers to be a Skrull. If true, they're taking their time getting to the reveal.

Add to that Arrow fans' long history of deciding that their fan theories are canon until proven otherwise (how many "John Diggle is John Stewart" stories did we get?), and you've got a generally messy, confusing situation where it's a safe bet that most of the people editing Arrow's IMDb page either don't know or don't care who will be in the premiere and who won't.

Hell, even Matt Nable -- who played Ra's al Ghul last season and is not a series regular in Season Four -- gets a "credit only" credit here...something that makes no sense, given that it's unlikely he would get a credit in an episode where he doesn't appear, and even if he did, nobody would know it until they'd seen that episode...which nobody has yet because it finished shooting two days ago.

To further illustrate the point, actress Enid-Raye Adams, who appeared in an episode of iZombie last season, is listed as playing Carol Ferris in the episode. That would make Carol almost ten years older than Oliver Queen (which is within the realm of possibility but seems unlikely).

There's also this wonderfully-illustrative bit from Adams' own IMDb page: "Enid-Raye Adams is a compelling and dynamic actor, said someone hired to write this biography."

So why bring this all up? Because on Facebook, Twitter and via e-mail, we've had inquiries about the IMDb page, either calling our attention to it or asking us to verify it. If one or two of these things turned out to be true, it would be surprising but not unprecedented. All of them, though? Borderline impossible.

That said, we reached out to The CW about rumors that Spencer List would play Connor Hawke more than a week ago and have had no response. That one was the first of the long-shot rumors attached to the IMDb page (and back then was actually called Connor on the page, not Ethan), predating the rest of them by about a week, and seems the most likely to be...well, if not true, at least plausible.

But still wildly unlikely when you consider that if The CW wanted it removed so that they could announce on their own timetable, they -- like anybody else -- could edit the page and have it removed.

List is named as Connor Hawke in the IMDb entry for the season's second episode, which also lists John Diggle's alternate alias as the long-running joke name "Black Driver."

Arrow returns to The CW, Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT, starting in October.