If you’re all caught up on Arrow then feel free to keep reading to find out the first non-spoilery news about Season 4. But if you’re still working your way through Season 1, 2 or 3 then perhaps you should just hit the back button as there will be some SPOILERS ahead…
Season 3 of Arrow recently came to a close and undoubtedly contained some of the darkest moments on the show so far. So much so that it has been compared to elements of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Not a bad comparison by anyone’s standards but will the show continue the trend or will it branch away for Season 4?
Well show runner Marc Guggenheim has recently been speaking to io9 about his new comic book series The Infinite Adventures of Jonas Quantum and the topic of Arrow came up, obviously. Guggenheim didn’t give too much away but said that Season 4 won’t be quite as dark as Season 3:
“We’ve been working for about a month now in the writers’ room, talking about Season 4, and I think that one thing we all collectively understood was Season 3 beginning with Sara’s death, because it’s the death of a major character on the show, it set a tone for the remainder of the season. And I’m not the least bit apologetic for that tone. I happen to like dark and I like the fact that Arrow is a pretty dark show particularly for a network show. That said, every year you want to mix things up and there was sort of a collective desire on all of our parts to try to inject a little bit more lightness into the show, a little bit more humor. It’s not going to radically change. The show’s still going to be the show but in terms of tone we’re coming off a very very hard season for all of our characters. We wanted to try to mix it up a little bit.”
Guggenheim also commented on the similarities between Arrow and Nolan’s version of Batman:
“It’s funny. Certainly a lot of people have found parallels to both Batman Begins and also to Ra’s al Ghul and the comics as he’s been portrayed. I think to a certain extent it comes with the territory of telling a story with the League of Assassins and Nanda Parbat and Ra’s al Ghul. One thing I often say, for us the difference between Batman and Arrow, the difference between our version of Oliver Queen and Bruce Wayne is that Bruce Wayne tends to make the right decisions. You can’t really point to too many instances where Bruce Wayne’s been on the wrong side of a judgment call whereas I think Oliver makes a lot of bad choices.”
A few days ago the first trailer for spin-off show Legends of Tomorrow debuted (watch it here) to an overall positive reaction and features Arrow, The Flash, White Canary, Captain Cold, Heatwave, Firestorm, Hawkgirl and The Atom. Guggenheim spoke about what we can expect from the new show:
“I think the show is going to be bigger, louder, more ambitious even than Flash and Arrow. I think Flash raised the bar on Arrow in terms of adding superheroes and we’re looking to now have the show raise the bar on Flash so you feel like the shows are getting bigger and bigger. One thing we sort of always tell you is that with Flash we’re really trying to provide a feature film every week. With this show we’re trying to provide a summer blockbuster every week.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HTiU_hrLms&list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5&feature=player_embedded
Originally published May 19, 2015. Updated March 1, 2020.
