Green Arrow and the Canaries is no longer happening at The CW.
On Friday, Deadline reported that the network passed on the Arrow spinoff starring Katherine McNamara as Mia Green/Green Arrow, Katie Cassidy as Laurel Lance/Black Siren, and Juliana Harkavy as Dinah Drake/Black Canary.
Though the fate of the project was announced just last week, Arrow co-creator Marc Guggenheim revealed that The CW’s decision to not move forward with the offshoot had been made some time ago.
“The decision was made back during the start of the pandemic (which, I believe, was the deciding factor),” Guggenheim tweeted on Friday. “The actual announcement was made today.”
Actually, the decision was made back during the start of the pandemic (which, I believe, was the deciding factor). The actual announcement was made today. https://t.co/WROzA2COdG
— Marc Guggenheim (@mguggenheim) January 8, 2021
He also retweeted a post from news site GreenArrowTV.com, which expressed their interest in seeing the three lead characters show up in the Arrowverse once again to resolve the cliffhanger at the end of the spinoff’s backdoor pilot. Guggenheim commented “Co-signed” on the tweet, suggesting that he, too, would like to see the Arrowverse tie up the loose ends of the project.
Co-signed. https://t.co/Tukai2WgTQ
— Marc Guggenheim (@mguggenheim) January 8, 2021
In an interview with TVLine last June, Guggenheim said that he would try to resolve the cliffhangers of the backdoor pilot in a comic book if the spinoff was not picked up to series. It’s unclear, however, whether this is still in the cards.
The backdoor pilot for Green Arrow and the Canaries aired on The CW in January 2020 as the ninth and penultimate episode of Arrow’s eighth and final season. Set in 2040 in Star City, the episode saw Bianca Bertinelli (Raigan Harris) get kidnapped by an anonymous figure wearing a Deathstroke mask, shattering the peace of a Star City that had been largely crime-free for the better part of 20 years. Mia is greeted by Laurel, who restored the younger woman’s memories from the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths timeline, transforming her into Green Arrow and building a team to take on new threats to the 2040s.
While the Green Arrow and the Canaries is officially dead at The CW, the network’s other remaining planted spinoff, The 100 prequel, is still alive and may still be picked up to series.
The CW President Mark Pedowitz revealed last May that the network was “very much in active discussions” to see what they can do with the two Warner Bros. TV-produced offshoots. “I’ve had many discussions with Warner Bros., we have a strategy involved — hopefully we can pull it off,” Pedowitz said at the time.
The CW and Warner Bros. reportedly explored the idea of the Green Arrow and the Canaries and The 100 prequel airing and streaming jointly on the CW and HBO Max. Following the end of the network’s output deal with Netflix and with all newer CW series now streaming on the WarnerMedia-owned over-the-top media service, that plan was considered a viable possibility and could still happen for The 100 prequel.
The spinoff, potentially titled The 100: Second Dawn, is set 97 years before the events of the original series. The 100 season 7, episode 8, titled Anaconda, served as the backdoor pilot for the spinoff and introduced Cadogan’s (John Pyper-Ferguson) daughter Callie (Lola Evans) and son Reese (Adain Bradley), who have very different opinions about their father. Should the project get ordered to series, The 100 creator Jason Rothenberg said that it will be some sort of Cain and Abel story between Callie and Reese.
Unfortunately for fans, there’s a very slim chance that any of the original characters from The 100 will pop up in the spinoff even if time warp and time travel were previously used as narrative tools in the mothership series.
Rothenberg also shared that some of his plans for the spinoff include “Lost-style flashback episodes” to pre-apocalypse times, as well as a plotline that will get the new characters up to space at some point.