Following Justice League and its introduction of Deathstroke on the big screen, The CW’s Arrow is not allowed to utilize Slade Wilson.
Arrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim revealed the news at ACE Comic-Con. First, he mentioned that the numerous DC television shows are simply borrowing the characters, and do not own them.
“These are DC’s characters, we’re just renting them ya know, so we use the characters that they tell us we can use when we can use them, and we work around whatever limitations that places us.
Then, Guggenheim was asked about Deathstroke specifically:
“Yeah, I think you know as a result we’ve been on and off. For a time they were saying ‘you can’t use Deathstroke’, and that changed and we were able to have Slade Wilson back on the show, and now we’re back to ‘you can’t use him’. They’re working on the feature film version, it really is sort of now that you’ve got obviously Slade, spoiler alert, Deathstroke appears at the end of the Justice League movie.”
Deathstroke was executed well in the show, but it remains to be seen if Warner Bros. can capture the same energy and performance with their films. Justice League didn’t perform up to expectations, so the silver lining in this is that, with the familiarity of Deathstroke, the character could potentially bring in some fans of the DC TV shows, specifically Arrow.
