Warner Bros. Already Has the Perfect Way to Save Legends of Tomorrow and Batwoman

DC fans are still reeling from the cancellations of Naomi, Batwoman, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, with Legends consistently trending on social media since the news broke and fans launching petitions, running billboard ads, and hashtag-bombing yesterday’s Warner Bros. Discovery upfronts. The cancellations came at a weird time for fans; Batwoman ended on a creepy and somewhat ambiguous note, and Legends with an out-and-out cliffhanger.  Producers have said not to blame the network, or the studio, making it murky whose call it was to abruptly end The CW’s long-running “Arrowverse” (while The Flash and Superman & Lois still exist, the latter rarely acknowledges the other shows and the former is almost certainly racing toward the finish line next season).

The cancellations come at a precarious time for Warner Bros. They have just been 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, The CW is on the market, with Warner Bros. and Paramount courting buyers including Nexstar, a company that owns hundreds of local TV stations and co-owns Food Network and Cooking Channel with Discovery.

In other words, nobody who was in a position to save the shows, wanted to spend the money to do it. One report suggested that Warner Bros. Discovery pulled the plug on the shows because they simply did not want to renew the lease on the studio space. But with a pretty serious push both on and offline to save the shows, is there any way to do it?

Well, yes. But there’s an asterisk here.

In the case of Batwoman, the most obvious home for the show would be HBO Max. Owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, who also owns DC and all of its IP, Batwoman would be relatively easy to revive if the company were so inclined (as would Naomi). Legends has a complication the others do not, though: Netflix.

Prior to the launch of HBO Max and Paramount+, The CW had been bolstering its bottom line with a long-term Netflix licensing deal that pumped cash into the pockets of all three parties. It’s why so many CW shows are Netflix-exclusive outside of the United States, and why most of them are bingeable on the streamer weeks after the season finale airs. After the launch of Paramount+ and HBO Max, Paramount’s CBS Studios and Warner Bros. Television had to answer to their respective corporate parents, who prioritized filling the new streaming platforms with content fans wanted. So, while Legends of Tomorrow and The Flash remain on Netflix (at least for now), shows like Batwoman, Naomi, and Superman & Lois are on HBO Max.

As a result, there has been some speculation that while DC owns the underlying IP, a show called DC’s Legends of Tomorrow might not be something HBO Max could make, even if they were so inclined, without paying out to Netflix. Given that such a buyout would likely cost more than a season’s worth of rent, it seems pretty unlikely it would happen.

If there was passion to wrap up these stories, though, it could still be done — and like so many other things with DC and Marvel, the comics could show the way.

Recently, DC began publishing Earth-Prime, the latest comic book series to take place within the Arrowverse. While The Flash, Arrow, and Supergirl all had tie-in comics once upon a time, it has been years since they were a regular fixture, and with Earth-Prime, DC took a new approach: it’s an anthology book.

More specifically, it’s a six-part miniseries that brings together various Arrowverse characters for the kind of crossover that fans haven’t seen since Crisis on Infinite Earths, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic complicating filming too much. But it also offers a blueprint for wrapping up dangling Arrowverse plotlines.

An Earth-Prime TV show or miniseries could pick up on not just Batwoman and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, but bring back fan-favorite characters from across the shows, tell the untold story of the failed Green Arrow and the Canaries pilot, and more. (Calling it Arrowverse would be a possibility, too, since that’s how fans know the world…but it would heavily imply that elements of Arrow would have to come back or fans would be disappointed.) It would sidestep any potential complications created by Legends of Tomorrow being a Netflix show, and provide some relatively low-cost content for HBO Max, which would have a guaranteed audience. If Legends and Batwoman fans were told tomorrow “you have a four-episode arc coming up on a DC anthology show, and that’s it,” most of them would gladly take it to have a real finale.

Of course, the challenge here would be getting Warner Bros. on board. The Strange Adventures anthology has recently been cancelled. While that show would have been a bit more esoteric, and not had the same built-in fanbase as the Arrowverse, it was also a DC anthology produced by Berlanti, so to pitch exactly that concept to HBO Max right now might be a stretch. And while The CW’s DC shows cost a fraction of what HBO Max is spending on things like Titans and Doom Patrol, you do still have to figure out where to shoot it, if you’re too cheap to pay for the existing studio space.

What do you think? Would you watch an Arrowverse anthology to wrap up Batwoman, Legends, and see some fan-favorite characters one more time? Sound off in the comments or yell at @russburlingame on Twitter about all things Arrowverse.