Arrow's A.T.O.M. Exosuit Mystery Explained (And There's An Iron Man Connection!)

So...whatever happened with that A.T.O.M. Exosuit?

ComicBook.com was one of a number of outlets who reported yesterday that Arrow had revealed Ray Palmer's costume in an international teaser trailer for tomorrow's midseason finale episode, "The Climb."

We then reported that the images contained in that footage were not, in fact, genuine Arrow footage and that, as many fans suspected, the armor came from Fallout 3. We also promised that we would have more details soon.

Well, during an interview with series executive producer Marc Guggenheim tonight, we got the full story. Immediately after getting our hellos out of the way, we asked: What was up with the Fallout 3 armor?

Here's what he had to say:

[Here's a] little behind-the-scenes [information].

Obviously there's a chunk of visual effects on the show and we always have to produce a rough cut to show the studio and the network and that's always long before any visual effects are done. So our editors and assistant editors basically temp in very temp effects. Like, there's temp explosions and there's temp muzzle flashes and there's temp arrows. In the case of Ray's super-suit at the end of Episode 307 and in the case of the one that you'll see now that's been revealed in 309, they pull an image off the Internet. Because it's for purely internal purposes, it's not meant to be shown in public. It's really just meant to give the studio and the network a sense of what's supposed to go there so that the characters are not looking at a blank shot.

In 307, we used some of Iron Man's armor from one of the Iron Man movies. After that leaked online...leaked is not even the right word. Somehow, there was a miscommunication or a screw-up by someone in the international promo department. Normally what we do is every time we do these temporary visual effects we slug onto the shot, "TEMP VFX" right on it. The only time that doesn't occur is just to give international promotions a sense of what things are going to look like, we give them what's called a clean cut, so we give them the entire temp without all the slugs. And somehow, someone felt it was final and it ended up in an international promo and someone stuck their iPhone in front of it and lo! and behold it was on the Internet.

We're not ripping off someone else's super suit. We've got our own and I'm really excited about it and you'll definitely get a better glimpse of it tomorrow night but everyone got a little unintentional peek behind the curtain.

Arrow airs Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW. The midseason finale, in which the full A.T.O.M. exosuit will actually debut, airs tomorrow.