Fans of the cancelled CW series DC’s Legends of Tomorrow have once again flown a #SaveLegendsOfTomorrow banner over Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank. This is the second time they have upgraded from buying billboards in cities around the world to plead with Warner Bros. Television parent company Warner Bros. Discovery. Legends has been consistently trending on social media since the news of the cancellation broke back in May, with fans launching petitions and hashtag-bombing the Warner Bros. Discovery upfronts. The plane carrying a banner urging WBD to “be a hero” and save Legends of Tomorrow flew over Warner Bros. Studios at noon PT.
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The sustained effort by Legends fans includes hashtags as well as hijacking other Twitter events (like the upfront presentations for both The CW and HBO Max), an online petition with thousands of signatures, and billboards around the world. It all feels a little reminiscent of the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign, albeit a bit smaller and without so much pushback from the rest of social media.
The cancellations came at a weird time for fans, and a precarious time for Warner Bros; Batwoman ended on a creepy and somewhat ambiguous note, and Legends with an out-and-out cliffhanger. Warner was recently acquired by Discovery, headed by David Zaslav, a CEO who didn’t worry about long-term damage to Discovery’s brand when he saw that low-cost reality TV could make more money than the documentary and educational programming the company had been built on. At the same time, a company called Nexstar acquired 75% The CW for $0, by agreeing to take on the network’s debts. That meant cancelling a huge number of shows in order to reduce overall expenses and make the network look more attractive.
That makes saving the show a complicated proposition, especially since the streaming rights are currently with Netflix, which presumably complicates the idea of HBO Max swinging in to save the day (although we have our own ideas about how that could be sidestepped).
A time-travel series with a revolving cast, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow changed things up in its seventh season by removing time-travel from the first handful of episodes. The Legends began the seventh season stranded in 1920s Texas. It later turned out that a corrupted version of Gideon, the AI that ran the team’s timeship the Waverider, had built a robotic team of evil Legends and was hell-bent on destroying the real ones and replacing them with more “efficient” versions of themselves.
Legends fans are no strangers to having to say goodbye to beloved characters. Earlier this season, a number of former cast members returned for the series’ 100th episode, in which a human version of Gideon flashed back to “unseen” moments from the crew’s past. Matt Ryan, who played Constantine on the show for several years, left the character behind at the end of season six and has since been playing Gwyn Davies, a nervous, deeply traumatized World War I veteran who was key to the invention of time travel in the 1920s.
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow stars Caity Lotz as Sara Lance/White Canary, Nick Zano as Dr. Nate Heyood/Steel, Tala Ashe as Zari Tarazi, Jes Macallan as Ava Sharpe, Matt Ryan as Dr. Gwyn Davies, Adam Tsekhman as Gary Green, Olivia Swann as Astra Logue, Shayan Sobhian as Behrad Tarazi, Lisseth Chavez as Esperanza “Spooner” Cruz and Amy Pemberton as Gideon.
