The Arrowverse’s Next Four-Way Crossover Will Increase “Emotional Stakes”

The big crossover between The CW’s DC line-up – otherwise known as the Arrowverse – has become the must-see event of the season for fans. Last year’s was the grandest yet, as a whole week’s worth of episodes were linked together to form one massive movie-sized crossover dubbed “Heroes vs Aliens.” With alien invaders, time travel and dimension hopping all involved, it’ll certainly be hard to raise the bar this year.

It makes sense, then, that the next crossover will roll back the stakes and up the emotional heft instead. That’s what exec producer Mark Guggenheim has claimed is the plan, anyway, in a quick chat with Entertainment Weekly where he said the following:

“If we end up doing what we’re talking about doing, it’s going to be pretty cool.  The crossover is always the most challenging thing we do, but it’s also the most fun. Every year we feel the pressure [to top ourselves]. I feel like each crossover has topped the previous one. Topping last year’s, that’s a high bar, if for no other reason than what do you do that’s bigger than aliens?

We’ve got some very, very exciting ideas…. Very early on in the process of doing last year’s crossover, Greg [Berlanti] said there’s probably no way to get bigger than aliens, so the best way to make the [next] crossover especially epic is if you can’t increase the bombast, increase the emotional stakes and the emotional payoffs, so that’s a very oblique comment on where our heads are at for this season.”

It sounds like Berlanti, Guggenheim and the rest of the team are on the right track here. It would definitely be hard to top the worldwide Dominator invasion story of last season and, arguably, the most enjoyable moments of the crossover was when our heroes interacted as characters rather than as allies in a fight. For instance, the scenes where Kara met Team Arrow and the Legends for the first time.

Judging by previous years, we should expect the week-long event to occur at some point in December, but as always, we’ll keep you posted once we get an exact date for the big Arrowverse event.