Marc Guggenheim Talks Possible DC Character Restrictions For Arrow

Paste Magazine just posted a really fascinating interview with Arrow Executive Producer Marc Guggenheim, and one of the topics that came up was whether or not the additions of Gotham on FOX and Constantine on NBC might put restrictions on what characters might be available for Arrow moving forward, since the shows will be on other networks.

(The Flash is, of course, on The CW.)

“I don’t know…we haven’t addressed it yet,” Guggenheim said about possible restrictions. “The way we work with DC is this—at the beginning of the year, they give us a list of characters who they think would be good for Arrow and that we might want to use. That’s always super helpful. Then, on an episode or arc basis, we’ll go to DC and say, ‘Can we use this character?’ Or, we’ll go, ‘Hey, we have a character like this, is there a DC character that fits that mold?’ Sometimes they say ‘yes,’ sometimes they say ‘no.’ Sometimes they say we can use one character but not another. There’s one character in Season Three that we couldn’t get, but DC proposed a better character. It just goes hand-in-hand. I think one of things people appreciated about Season Two was how far we went into the DC universe. We’ll be continuing that into Season Three,” he promised.

You can read the whole Guggenheim interview, including some talk about that Olicity moment from the finale, other TV show influences, how he became involved with Arrow, and more here.