Arrow's scrapped original ending would have featured a big Batman twist

Speaking to the Fake Nerd Podcast, Marc Guggenheim explained that his initial conception for how the DC series would end involving the death of lead character Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) inspiring Bruce Wayne to take up Batman's cape and cowl.

"I kind of had a little bit of a fantasy that Oliver would die and you'd end with some sort of news broadcast talking about his legacy and that would sort of become the voice over..." Guggenheim explained.

"Then you would go to this rooftop in a whole other city, and on the cut a thug or some bad guy would crash into the frame, having been punched off-screen, and this pair of black boots would come down right in front of him and there'd be a flutter of a scalloped cape and the voice over would say something along the lines of, 'Oliver Queen inspired a whole new generation of vigilantes.'

"The implication being, of course, that he inspired Batman. So that, of course, didn't happen for a variety of different reasons - not the least of which is Batwoman came along - but that was my original conception."

As Guggenheim mentions, this ending was ruled out once Arrow established in its later seasons that Batman was already operational in Gotham City during Oliver's tenure as the Green Arrow, with Bruce Wayne's cousin Kate Kane / Batwoman (Ruby Rose) later fronting her own spin-off series.

Arrow's aired its eventual series finale, closing the show after eight seasons, in January on The CW in the US. New episodes air in the UK on Wednesdays at 8pm on Sky One and are available on NOW TV.

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