Brandon Routh, who plays The Atom on DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, wants to see the cast of Black Lightning join up with the Legends and the rest of The CW’s DC heroes when the next big crossover comes around…although maybe not for the reason you expect.
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“The more the merrier — and then it’s less work for everybody else,” Routh joked while at the Black Lightning world premiere. “Or maybe it’s still more work. I don’t know if there’s any more room not he Waverider for anybody else. We barely fit everybody on the steps.”
The CW’s next big superhero franchise debuts tomorrow night following the midseason premiere of The Flash, and stars Cress Williams, Nafessa Williams, and China Ann McClain as Black Lightning and his two super-powerred daughters, Anissa (Thunder) and Jennifer (not yet named, but in the comics she’s Lightning).
The series is not conceived as part of the “Arrowverse” of shows, but showrunner Salim Akil told ComicBook.com that in the back of his head, the comic book fan in him does wonder whether they could be part of that multiverse.
There is an additional difficulty to bringing the Black Lightning cast to the Arrowverse that does not center on scheduling and screenwriting logistics: while Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow all film within about a half an hour of one another in Vancouver, Black Lightning shoots in Atlanta.
“It would be hard,” Black Lightning‘s Cress Williams told ComicBook.com. “The thing is, I don’t know, I don’t see the world where I would want to leave my community to help them, basically, we got our hands full. And I don’t know if they would, they have very macro ‘We gotta save the world’ issues coming to us. And then there’s also the logistical ‘We should go to Atlanta, and we should go to Vancouver.’”
Supergirl began as a show that was nominally unrelated to the other CW superhero shows. It filmed in Los Angeles and aired on a different network altogether. In its first season, the only crossover was with The Flash, and it involved Grant Gustin flying out to Los Angeles to shoot an episode of Supergirl on CBS.
During that story, it was revealed that while Supergirl did not occupy the same space as the other heroes, as her world (named Earth-38) was in fact one of the Earths in the multiverse previously discovered on The Flash. This has allowed the biggest crossover stories, like “Invasion!” and “Crisis on Earth-X,” to include Supergirl.
Black Lightning premieres tomorrow and airs Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow returns on Monday, February 12 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
