Stephen Amell is very proud of the work he did in Arrow and has never shied away from sharing his belief that the Arrowverse wasn't given the respect it deserved by Warner Bros. executives.
The actor frequently campaigned for himself and his fellow actors on The CW to be part of the DCEU, something that was never the plan (no great surprise given the very clear line that the studio has always drawn between its big and small screen adaptations).
Catching up with Smallville alum Michael Rosenbaum, Amell reflected on working with prolific producer Greg Berlanti and talk soon turned to a possible Arrow revival.
"I mean I joked about it," he said, "because I think that it would be wonderful one these days to go back and do something that was in a medium where I could break bones and drop an F-bomb and just sort of go the 'hard R' [rating] version of Arrow."
When Rosenbaum put it to him that they could make an Arrow movie, Amell added, "That'd be fun. We tried to do that...to my understanding, it just got killed at the studio level from people that, I think, were making decisions...that were fear-based."
We're not entirely sure what he means by that, though one possible interpretation is that he believes DCEU executives were concerned about the Arrowverse characters overshadowing the likes of Henry Cavill's Superman and Ben Affleck's Batman.
Either way, it's hard to imagine those talks ever getting serious because the Arrowverse had its place on The CW and was successful on the once teen-focused network.
There were once plans for an R-Rated Green Arrow movie called Supermax which was going to follow Oliver Queen as he attempted to escape from a prison full of iconic DC Comics supervillains. Amell was never attached to that and the project failed to ever get off the ground.
"That was a little unnecessary. I didn’t f***ing appreciate that at all," Amell recently said of Peacemaker's jokes at Green Arrow's expense. "Okay. I am just going to come right out and say this. There was just such...between the movies and Peacemaker a little bit...our show was kind of treated like shit. I get it, we’re on the CW, I get it, it’s TV."
"But I also get the fact that when people think about the most recent iteration of DC, they don’t think about the Snyder Cut - they think about the Arrowverse," Amell continued. "We got crapped on for years, and years, and years, and this just seemed excessive. I’m not actually mad, but I just remember hearing that and just being like, 'F*** those guys,' like seriously."
You can check out the full interview with the actor below.