For anyone wondering if the CW or the producers of ‘Arrow,’ ‘The Flash,’ ‘Supergirl,’ and ‘Legends of Tomorrow’ are working on a solution for how binge watchers can easily view cross-over episodes like ‘Invasion’ or ‘Crisis on Earth X’ on platforms like Netflix, there is not great news ahead. It seems that all of those folk are well aware of the difficulties in trying to jump from show to show to find out what happens during these massive events, especially if you are binge watching (though the CW app does have a landing page for ‘Crisis on Earth X’ that does make it pretty easy to watch one after the other). Solutions to this issue are not readily available, even though everyone would really like to see them all released together the way they were meant to be, and not separately as individual episodes of each series.
According to executive producer (on both ‘Arrow’ and ‘Legends of Tomorrow’) Marc Guggenheim, he did try to get it release as one movie, but it just wasn’t in the cards. In his words:
“I tried to get this released as a single, seamless — no act breaks — ‘movie.’ Maybe even with new material. What stopped us? Ironically, union rules regarding credit.”
Foiled by Unions again! I kid, of course, Unions are clearly important in Hollywood but a lot of the old Union rules have not yet been updated for current streaming situations and, of course, a lot of what the CW Arrowverse shows are doing is rather unprecedented, so it is hard to fault a contract for not being prepared for such a scenario. But here’s hoping they figure out something because I know a lot of people who do not necessarily enjoy every show in the Arrowverse, but do like the crossovers and want to see what happens, and they are all too often frustrated by having to stop their binge-watching to go hunt down the continuation of the story that just started in another series.
What do you think? Since these cross-overs are not likely to end soon, should they make this a top priority to figure out? Or will it not even matter in a few years if the Arrowverse comes to an end? Share your thoughts in the comments below!