Stephen Amell Says Crisis On Earth-X Isn’t Just A Crossover, It’s An Event

This year’s Arrowverse crossover is almost here, and it’s set to be the biggest one yet. Titled “Crisis on Earth-X,” the four-part event will see the assembled heroes take on their Nazi doppelgangers from another Earth.

During a recent set visit, Stephen Amell was on hand to talk at length about the special and explained how it doesn’t pay attention to which show the individual episodes fall under and will just tell one big crossover story.

“What I can tell you about this year is you know the order of the episodes, as in Supergirl, Arrow, Flash, Legends? That doesn’t mean s–t. You can’t tell what episode is what episode. The first episode centers on everyone coming together for Barry and Iris’s wedding. So you’re collecting everyone from all over the place, and then it’s really effectively their story throughout the first hour, which would indicate that it’s a Flash episode, except it’s not. I think it’s weird. I would wager to guess that I have the most screen time in all four episodes of the crossover.”

The actor then went on to tease the humongous scope of the event. In particular, he revealed that it was a massive strain on the production of these shows, as “Crisis on Earth-X” took so much time and effort to put together. In fact, he expects there to be a rethink on how these crossovers are produced in future seasons.

“Not to get too inside baseball here, but they have made it bigger than ever. When we conceived of the crossovers back in Season 3 of Arrow and Season 1 of Flash, it was like, ‘OK, I’m going to go, and I’m going to shoot on The Flash for four days. Fine.’ The crossovers this year took up six full weeks of shooting. I think that in order for us to continue down this path, we, as productions, and The CW, as the network, and Warner Bros., as the studio, are going to have to fundamentally re-conceive how we execute these because this sort of broke the schedule mold. I mean it just simply didn’t fit. It wasn’t that it was 14-hour days every day, it was a very long day.”

Finally, Amell concluded by explaining that he believes “Crisis on Earth-X” is too big to call a crossover and equates it to the Super Bowl in that it’s about so much more than just the shows coming together.

“I think that if we’re going to shoot it like a big four-hour movie, we have to board it like a big four-hour movie,” he said. “We have to prioritize the schedules of the people that are going to be working the most, if that’s me, if that’s Melissa, if that’s Caity Lotz, if that’s Grant. It’s going to change year over year based off of story. The payoff is that I’ve seen one cut of one episode, and it’s just… It’s like a four-hour escape.

There are some through-line storylines like Oliver and Felicity’s relationship, and Barry and Iris’s relationship, and what’s going on with Sara, what’s going on with Victor and Franz. It really is, for the first time, it’s an event. It’s not a crossover anymore. Call it the crossover if you want. But it’s kind of like calling the Super Bowl just a football game. Yeah, sure, they play football, but there’s so much other stuff that goes on with it. It’s an event.”

Hopefully, “Crisis on Earth-X” will live up to all the hype when it arrives next week. The crossover – sorry, Stephen – event kicks off on Monday, November 27th with Arrow and Supergirl, before wrapping up the next night on Tuesday, November 28th with The Flash and Legend of Tomorrow.