Arrow EP Says There’s a Chance We’ll See Cast Members Again After Show Ends

Arrow will be wrapping up a pretty significant run on The CW later this year, when the show’s eighth and final season debuts. But seeing as the series has spawned quite a lot of spinoffs and offshoots, it sounds like goodbye might not mean forever. ComicBook.com got a chance to talk to Arrow consulting producer Marc Guggenheim, who addressed if and how the show’s characters will live on in the Arrowverse, once the show is done.

“That’s a terrific question, and there’s always a chance.” Guggenheim explained. “Especially since this has now become this huge universe. We have all these different places we can go, different ways we can tell stories. And the thing I always – and I’ve been saying this for a few years now, because it’s been a universe for a few years now – whenever an actor leaves the show, I always say ‘It’s not goodbye, it’s see you later.’ Because we have all these different avenues available to us, between time travel and parallel universes and animated — you name it, we’ve got all these different avenues, which is a nice thing to be able to explore.”

Fans have certainly seen that mindset on display throughout the Arrowverse’s run, with an array of characters appearing on the Vixen and Freedom Fighters: The Ray animated series, and seemingly-dead characters like Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy Rodgers) and Ronnie Raymond/Firestorm (Robbie Amell) returning as alternate versions of themselves on the live-action shows. It certainly stands to reason that Arrow‘s principal cast could do the same, regardless of what their endgame is once the show comes to a close.

That question has been floated to the series’ cast quite a bit over the years including to series star Stephen Amell. While the fate of Amell’s Oliver Queen appears to be sealed in the upcoming “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover, it sounds like he isn’t opposed to coming back.

“If you were to ask the people that were involved in Arrow, ‘how long should it go?’ The answer would have been five years,” Amell admitted at a convention appearance earlier this year. “You would have told the flashback story and you would have told concluded your story as you caught up the flashback story to the beginning of the series. That’s the best synchronicity of the thing. That’s not the way that network television works; we kept going. I feel like we had a year that was, I would call it ‘in limbo.’ We knew it was a good season but we knew during that season, we made the decision that either season 7 or season 8 we were going to wrap it up. And I feel like the endgame — no pun intended — was going to make the show sharper. For me, it was just very important to go out strong. When I did the video announcing that we were going to wrap things up, I said, ‘I might be leaving the show but no one’s ever going to be gone.’”

“So if five years from now they’re wrapping up Show X and they were like, ‘You know what would be the cherry on top of the sundae? Would you come back?’” Amell added. “What am I gonna say? No? It’s a shitty idea that I’d say no. You do what you can. I owe a lot to people, if they need something from me they can always have it.”

Arrow‘s final season will begin Tuesday, October 15th, at 9/8c on The CW.