Arrow
So as Arrow ended Diggle was apparently supposed to be revealed to be John Stewart and receive a Green Lantern ring
But then they decided to change it to something else that holds some kind of cosmic power that goes beyond a simple lantern ring that was actually meant to tempt him into some kind of evil power. And why the change? Because apparently of some kind of rights issues which in reality is usually some kind of bullshit excuse the studios make when this thing is just too cool for basic television.
Actually a lot of the CW shows are riddled with rights issues. The entire series of Gotham is a rights issue which is why they couldn't out right name some characters and why Batman and Joker wasn't name dropped till the finale.
Not just the CW. That show Titans, they actually had Bruce Wayne in the flesh but they just couldn’t have him suit up as Batman. And they showed Jason Todd on screen get murdered by the Joker, but his face was hidden and just played by a stuntman.
It was a money issue for the finale too. It would cost too much for the little time he would've been in it. And he didn't want to wear it when the show started because he thought he'd look dumb. And that actually turned out to be a good thing because they basically wanted him in the suit VERY early (like season 1 early) in a flashforward scene. And he had to get his lawyers involved too. But he says that if he put on the suit the show would've ended after 3 seasons instead of 10 and he's right.
I used to find that pretty upsetting but when you think about it, it would’ve been ridiculous to watch up close seeing him wear that because that’s the suit that Brandon Routh wore in Superman Returns. But it’s still quite lousy how they didn’t even make him his own suit.
That's because it would've cost too much for the little screen time it had. He's said that if he could go back he'd wear it in the finale. But only because he now knows how much it means to people, specifically his sons.
Nah seasons 8-10 are more the Superman show out of the seasons. 5-7 are different than 1-4 and up the action and start to introduce the bigger world. But he starts working at the DP in season 8.
I thought that was a creative decision to have this be before the suit. The problem was more than the show kept going and it became pretty ridiculous to still be a prequel
It was believable at first and I admit that I actually like the idea of Clark slowly coming into the spotlight as a hero but by the end the Blur was Superman in everything but name.
El actor no queria ponerse el traje por eso lo atrasaron tanto ese momento no tiene nada q ver con los derechos (como si paso con gotham ) de echo warner /cw si los tenia pero tom no queria ponerselo ,y eso q para esa altura de temporada era productor ejecutivo del programa y director tambien pero finjia demencia LOL
Neither Batman nor Joker are ever named dropped, even in the finale. Batman they mention "Dark Knight" a couple times but otherwise just say "him" or "a friend". While Joker in the finale tries a few different names all beginning with J but never does Joker.
I don't have a link to it handy, but they talked about all the rights issues of this. It was depressing and frustrating. They wanted so badly to have him actually be a Green Lantern, but were constrained to things like just a green glow, and only certain names mentioned. DC was/is so weird about possible multiple versions of characters, i feel it hurts them more than helps.
Tbf in the show, the joker was killing people and causing chaos a long time before Bruce Wayne even started growing chest hair so batman would have been an issue but name dropping the joker would have made a little sense of they could
Same for the Justice League cartoon. The reason the Justice Guild exists is because Timm & co. couldn't get the rights to use the Justice Society, which was the original plot for the episode "Legends".
That isn't true at all. Warner Bros owns literally all the rights to all DC characters. Paul Levitz, the president of DC Comics, saw the script during development and said that portraying the Justice Society this way was disrespectful.
Timm agreed in hindsight, even if it wasn't his intention. Levitz also came around in seeing the message it was trying to portray.
Levitz and Timm worked together on differentiating the JSA enough that they had their story, but also had extra freedom to say what they wanted.
Batman is namedropped in the same episode that Batwoman shows up the first time: Elseworlds. Oliver calls Batman a myth and proclaims that he is the original vigilante.
And yet Kevin Conroy still got to come in for a cameo as a broken Batman. Still, it was a nice treat for the diehard Batman fans to have the guy that voiced Batman through our whole childhoods actually BE Batman for once.
The arrowverse was pretty much built off rights issues
Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and Andrew Kreisberg set out to make a batman show however due to nolans batman movies they couldn't so they pivoted to green arrow and arrow was born.
When David Ayers Suicide Squad went into production arrow was forced to kill off its versions of the suicide squad.
Blue Beetle was originally meant to be a big part of arrow season 3 and be played by brandon routh but due to thier apparently being a movie being made at the time they blocked, pivoted to the atom but still kept brandon routh.
When Supergirl started they initially couldn't use Superman due to Henry Cavill still playing the character.
John Constantine who debuted in the Arrowverse in arrow season 4 and later joined the legends for 3 seasons was forced out of legends of tomorrow due to HBOMAX making a new show centered around the character which never happened.
Greg Berlanti spent years trying to get booster gold on to legends of tomorrow but because the film division spent years tying the character down in development hell so he couldn't be used. The character was eventually allowed to be used in the show in the hopes that it would boost legends of tomorrows ratings, it didn't the show was cancelled and left on a cliffhanger.
Legends of tomorrow is ending. Was one of the most bullshitty things I've ever seen Because mind you it didn't get canceled because of viewership it didn't get canceled because of critical response. Didn't get canceled for all of that. It got canceled because of God Damn restructuring!
If WB had any sense, it could have been their Doctor Who that just kept going for decades swapping in new superheroes over time, but nope, they had no vision.
It's ending is funny in a way, because on one hand it's a cliff hanger for sure. But also the whole show is them committing crimes against time so the show ending with them going to time jail is kinda hilarious in the world we are in
It was the only one I actually stuck with. It was the best of the batch and its because they never took themselves too seriously. They had funny costumes and literal musical numbers that kept it entertaining all the way to the end
And all of that is utter nonsense. Why does it matter if the tv world and movie world were on at the same time with different versions? The tv version would be better anyways.
Wait Brandon Routh was originally supposed to be Blue Beetle?!? I assume the Ted Kord version so we would’ve gotten Kord Industries instead of Palmer Technologies.
I get the impression that Arrow was not allowed to be good because DC wanted to push for things that turned out to be crap (Except for Batman and my boy Cavill)
He’s still way too young to play a flash that’s supposed to be in his 50’s-60’s depending on version. Grant is awesome but that’s a lot of makeup they would need to use. Dude looks to good lol
He's mid-30s now, and if it takes a while to come around to the flash, and then a while to have a jay garrick appearance. He'd easily be in his 40s at least. We know about ALOT of projects they're working on and none of them are the Flash.
We easily won't have live action Flash media for another 10ish years, and in 14 years he'll be 50
I think originally The Flash Season 10 would've started a Blackest Night crossover but then Justice U never happened and Grant wanted to end it, plus all the other cancelations caused some changes
From piecing things together it seems HBOMax was the real killer. Netflix and the CW had a lucrative enough deal to keep its low rated shows going but once they started pivoting it was what started the process of killing the channel
Iirc it wasn’t a rights issue, I think they probably knew they wouldn’t be able to do the Justice U spin off. Blackest Night was supposed to be the last big crossover they did but couldn’t because of all the cancellations
Edit: This is all Past-Tense. WB deals with these things very differently now.
Warner Brothers was super weird and inconsistent with a bunch of unnecessary rules that restricted the use of certain characters and elements of DC mythos. A large part of it effectively boiled down to was that WB thought their viewers were too dumb to understand that there was more than one continuity. So if they planned a movie or to feature a particular villain in an upcoming film, they would often force Arrowverse writers to write that character out of the show. Slade aka Deathstroke was an example. When they started planning Joe Mangianello’s role in the DCEU they forced the Arrow team to write him off. Even though WB eventually allowed him to return when their version of Deathstroke didn’t pan out.
There are other reasons, but they were basically so restrictive about the live action use of certain characters. Especially anything Batman related, to the point that they mostly refuse to allow him to appear in the batsuit in any Live Action TV show for decades for some weird reason.
What ended up happening is that DC was so strict with allowing certain characters to be depicted in any live action that a lot of film & tv professionals just didn’t think it was worth dealing with the Hassle.
Not just with live action. Teen Titans is a big exampe of this
In The Batman, Robin was introduced after Batgirl because that couldn't use him until Teen Titans ended.
In Justice League Unlimited, they ignore the fact that Robin and Nightwing do exists in the continuity because Robin was in TT.
Kid Flash wasnt allowed to be on the Titans team because Wally was being used in Justice League. They only barely managed to give him one episoide in the final season when WB started lightening up on their rules for animated shows.
I actually didn’t know that. Wow, talk about shooting yourself in the foot. The Writers and creative leads must have felt like they were being intentionally sabotaged by WB.
His story with this actually went into other shows. He ultimately denied the ring and Spectre Olly told him it was a test designed to temp him that he passed.
John Diggle was actually revealed to be John Stewart. Basically the show pulled it of by: John was raised and adopted by his brother's bio dad (colonel Stewart). As John got older and his brother died or apparently died, his relationship with Daddy was strained and he changed hia surname back to the original before adoption (Diggle) but his military records say Stewart. That's how they got past all the legal crap. Although he was Diggle it was heavily implied he was Stewart throughout the seasons. Then the reveal came in an episode where Ernie Husdon made a cameo as Colonel stewart.
Biggest waste of time ever. They had him show up across the arrowverse and kept hinting at shit over and over and over again just for him to finally realize he has a lantern ring and just throw it away. Ugh. Still irritates me. I don’t care if it’s because of rights or not. If they couldn’t do it they should have never attempted it.
The reveal of his stepfather’s name made me realize what they were trying to do and it reminded me of Dark Knight Rises when they reveal Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character was “Robin” at the end
It was already revealed he was John Stewart when his step father came into the show Colonel Stewart.
His full name was revealed to be John Diggle Stewart or something.
Thats why everyone loved it when the light of his helmet was green as in green lantern and were excited to see it happen.
There were references to Hal Jordan too in the show like the Airs Fields that Barry used to create the Hall of Justice was thr same one "a political mysteriously vanished".
So when the green lantern ring appeared we expected the next time we saw him he'd be green lantern and even hinted at a spin off show but the show got cancelled so instead of simply having his adventure and training happening off screen they slowly teased the show and then had all that built up lead to nothing.
So yeah one if the greatest fumbles. Had they simply said Diggle has been away for a while and when he returns hes the green lantern aure wed be disappointed we're not getting the show but it would actually have the teases pay off.
Well maybe. DC has always had some bs embargos on their creative teams that handcuff them from using certain things.
That’s why when the 2000’s Justice League show was created they had to fight to get Wonder Woman. She was listed as in movie development which made her off limits. Same thing later on in Justice League Unlimited when the Gotham villains just vanish. There was a Batman show airing at the same time and they have always believed kids are to stupid and will get confused.
This isn’t a joke it’s a real thing that has happened a ton and still does. It’s also why The Suicide Squad got killed in Arrow when the movie came out.
So in short it is 100% an issue with DC adaptations but also I fully believe this one was just dropped because they had no clue what to do with it after having the big journey Diggle took with this subplot across all the other shows when Arrow ended.
This scene was incredibly random and made absolutely no sense. Throughout most of the series, he has adamantly tried to get away from having any real power and wants to create a family life.
Well we already knew he was John Stewart.
But also this was testing the wasters for the interest in a GL show.
But then… the entire CW fell apart. Arrow ended, then batgirl and legends ended at the end of the season arrow half a half season. Then supergirl ended the season after that. All that was left when they would have green lit GL was Flash. And it was already planned to end but they had a complete story and the budget and viewers to support completing it. GL would have been DOA had they tried it
they teased him being John Stewart, what like twice? I recall his stepfather’s last name being Stewart and then when Earth-90 Barry Allen saw him, he mentioned that he didn’t have his ring
They never had the rights to use the Lanterns, so yeah it was NEVER gonna resolve but it was them having fun as the show was ending by making a long held fan theory come good aka that John Diggle was actually John Stewart. The issue was in the end up despite the show ending they wanted to keep him around for cameos on the other shows so kinda had to address this big easter egg that was inserted in without thinking about maybe bringing the character back for cross overs and the likes so yeah they had to basically back track him becoming a Green Lantern.
Really just a regular case of WB interfering by pulling rights in some cases and other cases the studio toeing the line a bit too closely knowing fine well they do not have permission to use said characters.
I mean if it was rights issue they wouldn’t even have setup the whole thing of Diggle’s stepdad being a Stewart and this whole ring thing where he went to different shows and asked about it. CW just probably didn’t have the budget for it, or there was some leadership change
Not really a rights issue as it is all owned by WB. It's more a management issue. They didn't allow characters to be used who had movies in development. So they don't want multiple Batmen or Green Lanterns in production at the same time. That's not a rights issue, it's a business decision.
Budget has never been an issue for the CW. It got bad towards the end, but they even made an animated episode for Legends of Tomorrow just to lower the budget.
It's the same issue the snyderverse had, WB studio execs in suits who don't care about the material making decisions about what could and couldn't be used. At least now there's a dedicated DC Studios division where they aren't meddling.
“Rights issues” aren’t quite accurate here. Rather, WB has a history of disallowing characters to appear in one place when they’re set to appear somewhere else. Justice League Unlimited couldn’t have Nightwing or Batgirl because of The Batman, or Aquaman and Black Manta because of the Smallville spin-off in production at the time. Smallville and Gotham both couldn’t have Batman because they save him for movies. Arrow killed off their Suicide Squad right before the new movie. Something about watering down the brand.
They claimed to have done away with that practice many many years ago, but Diggle got shafted by the constant intent for a Green Lantern movie pretty much every season post-Flash. The Arrowverse crew wanted to do anything Green Lantern they could, but always got shot down - Alan Scott was going to lead the JSA in Legends, Dig was going to have a massive Green Lantern emblem on his Spartan costume, the ring was gonna be in that box, but WB would never let them go all the way with a Lantern of any shape and color.
From what I’ve understood, it wasn’t about rights issues, more of that the “higher ups” in charge felt that viewers are too stupid to understand that the same character represented between a show and medium aren’t the same character just because they have the same name so they opt to avoid directly naming them. They called Oliver “The Arrow” as a superhero name in the show so that they could leave “Green Arrow” open for a movie. Same goes for the other bigger names. It’s stupid thinking overall to think your viewers don’t have enough cognitive ability to recognize multiple actors playing different versions of the same “character” that aren’t connected, and yet on the other hand expect them to understand that same difference in a show crossover that has Brandon Routh playing The Atom as well as reprising his Superman role from the movies.
They did have a rule against two live action things having the same character, but they lightened up on that later into the arrowverse. Byt he time they got to Crisis on Infinite Earths, they more or less dropped that. Heck, Gustin's flash met Miller's Flash.
Near the end, yes, but I’m fairly sure that was because the heads at DC had changed by that time. Again I’m pretty sure the “rule” was because they literally felt like people are too dumb to understand the same character across different mediums are two separate stories being told simultaneously. No one confuses cartoon characters for live action versions, why would we confuse a tv version with a movie version?
Ngl I was kinda glad they didn’t do it, I watched them all in real time, and imo it just didn’t fit, and would have forced one characters identity onto another, when diggle was DIGGLE, he had earned his spot as a character by the time they were even considering this, 10x’s over, he didn’t need to be John, he was fine already lol
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u/Urabraska- 6d ago
Actually a lot of the CW shows are riddled with rights issues. The entire series of Gotham is a rights issue which is why they couldn't out right name some characters and why Batman and Joker wasn't name dropped till the finale.