The CW's DC Shows are All In

Now, I feel as though that Warner Bros. did a spectacular job in showcasing their new movies that are coming out in 2016: they had awesome trailers, the casts were enjoyable to hear from, and the crowd in Hall H, as far as I could tell, was enjoying their time there. Because, at the end of the day, these folks that make their way out to San Diego Comic-Con and take the time to wait in line that long do deserve some reward for their efforts. The DC movie panels definitely did the job, but that wasn't all that DC showed with.

 With the  massive critical success of the CW's first DC-licensed show, Arrow, they have since launched a spin-off titled The Flash, which was met with even more success, both critically and commercially. As a matter of fact, throughout the first three seasons of Arrow and the first season of The Flash, DC's creative team now feels confident enough that they have enough talent to showcase a group of both heroes and villains saving the world in a new upcoming project, titled DC's Legends of Tomorrow. The third show is said to launch by January 20016, and the first halves of both Arrow's season 4 and The Flash's season 2 are being used to help set that show up, when the time comes.

Now, take a moment, because that's a lot of information to digest. Be that as it may, I'm excited for this news, Making content for television isn't an easy thing, and in many ways it's more challenging than producing a film (not always, but sometimes).To see that Warner Bros. is putting this much confidence in DC's creative team to let them run, essentially, three shows at a time and trust that each one will be successful speaks volumes about what kind of company they are.

Even with all that positivity, I didn't like what I saw that came out of the panels. Honestly, not one of them gave us anything substantial to see or react to. To make it easier to read and process, I'll take each show's panel at a time, starting with Arrow...

 Finishing season 3, Arrow probably has the most curiosity in terms of what lies ahead for the main character, Oliver Queen/The Arrow. No spoilers here, but what essentially happens is Oliver has a reason where he doesn't need to be a moody archer anymore. In terms of giving fans something to look forward to, there were a few news drops - Damien Darhk is the season's villain, Oliver will return in a more traditional Green Arrow costume, and even his friend Diggle will finally be wearing an outfit. Beyond that, there was no trailer, nothing to physically see outside of the new Green Arrow outfit. The third season ended on a happy yet open note, and not a whole lot of questions were answered, not even really addressed. I can understand that as you're filming multiple episodes at a time, it's hard to edit and put together something physical to take with you to a plus-15 minute meet-and-greet for fans to see, but at least give us a little taster of what we might get to witness in three months time - a quick-shot of a new character, a glimpse of a fight scene, anything would have been greatly appreciated. Unfortunately, all that they brought was one or two pieces of concept art, some quick reveals by word-of-mouth, and a costume reveal. Unfortunately, that's the kind of showing that just discourages me to go see that panel next year.

Following Arrow was what was, in my opinion, the best show of the 2014-2015 season, The Flash. Now, just like Arrow, The Flash showed up with their cast and producing crew (all people who I think are awesome, just so you know), and they did bring with them some video - but it was essentially just a season recap. No costume reveals, no concept art, and a few character name-drops to go along with the season recap. However, this season recap came with something at the end - a clip of a blue speedster racing through Central City while we hear quotes from the characters - these quotes are helping to give hints about the tone of the next season. While that's certainly more than what Arrow gave us, I'm still not convinced it's enough to get me into the panel when I can hear about it half an hour later. See, it gets even trickier with The Flash because they have a lot of special effects work that they need to get done, which I can appreciate, but a lot of these actors were talking about how they all received the first three or four scripts of the season by the time they all came to Comic-Con: are we really expected to believe that they hadn't been filming at least some of the episodes, or that they hadn't filmed enough to be able to put something together for fans to see? It may be petty, but it's just disappointing to see, because you can meet these guys in the regular lines throughout the day - you don't need to take your afternoon or evening out just to go to a separate line to hear the cast and crew joke around with each other.

Closing off the CW's DC showing was DC's Legends of Tomorrow, which I didn't really expect much from in all honesty. And with that, I didn't get much. The cast was there, they answered questions, and that was about the extent of it. I mean, they dropped a pretty rad trailer back a couple of months ago when they revealed the show was coming, so my only real complaint was that the guy who is going to be playing time-traveler Rip Hunter, Arthur Darvill, wasn't there to talk about his role. Being that he'll be the newest one to join the crew outside of Ciara Renee's Hawkgirl, I was excited to hear what his purpose in the show was, and his connections to any other time-travelers we might have already met could be. Alas, what we got was much of the same, except even less was revealed at this panel. And after all was said and done, I can understand this - most of this cast is going to start out in the other shows anyway, so they probably haven't filmed much beyond what was clearly that early taster. If you haven't seen it and would like a bit more context of what I'm talking about, here's the link: DC's Legends of Tomorrow Trailer

Overall, it's nice to see that a television studio has so much faith about running three separate comic book shows at once, but that doesn't mean you need to go stop by their panel at next year's comic-con. These television teams need to get me excited about going to see them on a stage, and right now they're not really encouraging me to do so. Hopefully, as they get even more and more popular, that'll change. But for now, all I can do is sit patiently and wait for October to arrive.