'Arrow' Showrunner Signs Multi-Year Overall Deal With Warner Bros. TV

Arrow showrunner Beth Schwartz may be wrapping up the gritty superhero crime drama next season, [...]

By Russ Burlingame

Arrow showrunner Beth Schwartz may be wrapping up the gritty superhero crime drama next season, but she will stick with Warner Bros. Television for a while, having signed an overall deal that will ensure the two stay close. According to Deadline, the deal sees Schwartz -- who started on Arrow as a writer's assistant and worked her way through the ranks over the life of the show -- will have business with WB (and presumably Greg Berlanti, whose Brothers and Sisters she also worked on) for the foreseeable future. Schwartz, who has also worked on DC's Legends of Tomorrow and Hart of Dixie, thanked fans on social media for the outpouring of support after the announcement came.

Schwartz took over as showrunner at the start of the current, seventh season, which has refreshed the series by introducing new characters and concepts. She will head up Arrow through its ten-episode final season in the fall, and then -- who knows? Smart money might be on her heading to Batwoman, if that series heads to series. Little is known about the creative makeup behind that series, which is part of the Arrowverse and executive produced by Berlanti.

The series are heading into "Crisis on Infinite Earths" next season, and it stands to reason that Schwartz, with a more limited workload given her shorter season on Arrow, will be heavily involved in planning that project.

During a recent interview, Schwartz talked with ComicBook.com about tomorrow's episode of Arrow, which is a full-length flash-forward titled "Star City 2040."

"We're going to parallel those worlds a lot more in the last chapter of the season," Schwartz said, explaining that the storytelling would take a form similar to what Arrow often did with its flashbacks during the first five seasons. "The first chapter, definitely, we opened a lot of questions. There's a lot of mystery, and then, one by one, we're going to start to reveal all those mysteries and then we'll have a lot more paralleling of our characters from our present day to how they became who they are in the future."

Arrow airs on Monday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.

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