Before Green Arrow wound up on television, Warner Bros. had plans to bring the character to the big screen in a very unique and exciting sounding superhero movie. Written by Man of Steel scribe, Green Arrow: Escape from Super Max would have seen Oliver Queen wrongly imprisoned and attempting to escape from a high security facility, with villains like Lex Luthor and The Joker set to make cameo appearances.
Despite being unique in its approach, this is a movie not all that different to Suicide Squad, and Goyer has acknowledged in a new interview both that, and the fact that Warner Bros. executives at the time had no interest in moving forward with a DC Comics adaptation not revolving around guaranteed money earners, like Batman and Superman.
“I think if that script had come over the transom a couple of years later… It was completely ahead of its time. You know, Marvel was considering doing the Sinister Six and at the time, God, I think this was eight or nine years ago that we wrote a couple of drafts, but it certainly was like this oddball project at Warner Bros at the time, they were like–even though the script was good–‘why would we make a movie about a bunch of villains? That makes no sense’.”
Despite that, it sounds like Goyer had at least one person at the studio on his side, but before Marvel came along and changed the game, they just couldn’t understand the necessity of a character like Green Arrow – who now obviously stars in a very successful TV series on The CW – having his own big screen outing.
“The executive on it was really visionary, but the higher-ups, none of whom are at Warner Bros any more, just thought at the time, you know, we just want to make Batman and Superman movies. We don’t want to make any other characters. But this is before Marvel had really taken off, before more obscure projects like Guardians Of The Galaxy or Ant-Man or things like that had huge success, before the current gold rush I guess, if you will. It’s natural that eventually someone was going to make a villain movie, so that’s just what happened!”
Goyer went on to confirm that he won’t be directing any of the upcoming DC Comics movies, and for now, it doesn’t sound as if Warner Bros. has changed their mind on Green Arrow: Super Max (a movie which would no doubt need a massive overhaul to work in the DC Extended Universe now).
Still, it’s hard not to hope that a future season of Arrow might decide to borrow some elements from Goyer’s screenplay, as it’s a concept with a ton of potential.
