Arrow Creator Marc Guggenheim on the Difference Between Making a Movie and Running a CW Event

Marc Guggenheim, co-creator of TV shows like Arrow and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, has some experience in the feature film world, working on projects like 2011’s Green Lantern and a late-stage rewrite on Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters. He has also served as the “showrunner” on The CW‘s Arrowverse crossovers, including the massive “Crisis on Infinite Earths” event that aired last season. Fans have long hoped to see “movie”-style releases for “Crisis” and other Arrowverse events, bringing the episodes together to present the story as a longer, continuous whole. The process of writing the two is pretty different, though.

Guggenheim broke down some of the differences during a panel released today to the Comic Con International website. The video was part of the Storytelling Across Media event, which brought together numerous talents who have worked across comics, TV, film, and prose, to talk about the key differences and similarities.

“The difference really I think comes down to the way I work with the showrunners,” Guggenheim explained during the panel. “It’s a very sort of…I want to say it’s a delicate dance but that implies that people are difficult to work with and that’s not at all true, everyone’s wonderful. I feel very strongly, having been someone who’s run these shows, that my job is not to come in and dictate anything to any of the other showrunners. If someone was doing that to me, I would find it really obnoxious and annoying. So when I did the crossovers, I felt like my goal was to help provide a rubric or a structure that the different showrunners could come in and sort of hang their various ornaments on, and help in terms fo moving the dialogue forward both in terms of breaking story and in terms of how do we produce this monstrosity? That’s its own little trick. That’s a very different endeavor than writing a movie where, it’s just me in a room when I’m writing a movie. Yes, I’ll do it in conjunction with production partners and studio execs, and everyone has ideas and notions, but even on movies where I’ve got a director attached, at the end of the day it is just me alone at the keyboard so it’s a very different type of experience.”

You can check out more of the SAM interviews posted today at the Comic-Con website or YouTube channel.