Marc Guggenheim Says He Would Consider Making an Arrowverse Movie

During a panel for Comic Con International's Storytelling Across Media series over the weekend, Arrow co-creator Marc Guggenheim said that he would consider making a movie that starred the "Arrowverse" versions of DC heroes if the opportunity came along. The acknowledgement came as he confirmed that he has officially stepped away from the Arrowverse. While Guggenheim had not served as showrunner on Arrow or the other show he co-created, DC's Legends of Tomorrow, in a few years, his involvement as the showrunner of The CW's annual DC superhero crossover events had kept him very involved in the day-to-day operation fo the shared universe those shows inhabit. Now, with Arrow finished and Supergirl about to wrap up, Guggenheim is ready to move on, with last year's "Crisis on Infinite Earths" mega-event as his victory lap.

Guggenheim and Arrow co-creator Greg Berlanti are working with comics legend Geoff Johns on Green Lantern for HBO Max, and Guggenheim has written at least two screenplays for film during the pandemic lockdown -- one, a draft for a film based on Rob Liefeld's comic Prophet, and the other a spec script for a legal drama he is shopping around. We asked him, with that as the backdrop, whether he might want to bring the TV versions of DC superheroes that he is so closely associated with into the feature film world.

"I think so," Guggenheim told me during the panel. "I do love these characters, and I do miss working in this world."

You can see the video below.

Some fans would argue that Guggenheim's mega-crossovers were movies unto themselves, especially in the last four years as telling a single, interconnected narrative took over for the more serialized nature of crossovers from the first couple of years. Guggenheim, though, knows there's quite a bit of difference between the two.

"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 this weekend at the Comic-Con website or YouTube channel.