Tomorrow will see the release of “Crisis on Infinite Earths” news that will apparently have been years in the making, according to executive producer Marc Guggenheim, who is overseeing the massive CW crossover event. The tease is not entirely surprising, given that the crossover has already announced pieces of casting — from John Wesley Shipp’s Flash to Brandon Routh as the Kingdom Come Superman — that draws on DC’s legacy in film and TV. The idea of something going back “almost 10 years” is not as surprising here as it might be in other, similar contexts. In fact, that “almost” might suggest that whatever it is just goes back to the early days of Arrow, and is not another bit of stunt casting.
You can see Guggenheim’s tweet below, which is a “sequel” to one he made yesterday joking that the people involved with the ambitious and exhausting “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover feel a bit like they have been working on it for ten years.
We’ll break something tomorrow that shows we’ve been working towards this for ALMOST 10 years… https://t.co/GxWTE0K9VP
— Marc Guggenheim (@mguggenheim) October 1, 2019
Guggenheim later stepped in to tell fans that it was not Smallville-related news, since the presence of Tom Welling’s Clark Kent and Erica Durance’s Lois Lane made that a popular guess more or less immediately.
“Crisis on Infinite Earths” has loomed over the Arrowverse for years. The series premiere of The Flash featured an allusion to the hero disappearing amid red skies in the year 2024. During the original comics event, red skies were a sign of doom to come to a world during the Crisis. At the end of last season, a couple of things happened: The Monitor (LaMonica Garrett), who had appeared in “Elseworlds,” reappeared and revealed that Oliver Queen was destined to die in the Crisis…and the future newspaper at STAR Labs rolled back the expected date of the Crisis from 2024 to 2019.
In the comics, Crisis on Infinite Earths centered on a battle between the combined superheroes (and even some villains) of the DC multiverse and an immortal, cosmic threat known as the Anti-Monitor. Like The Monitor, the Anti-Monitor will be played by LaMonica Garrett in the Arrowverse. As the Anti-Monitor destroys realities, he replaces their positive matter energy with antimatter, growing his own power and sphere of influence. He was eventually stopped by the sacrifices of several heroes, including The Flash and Supergirl, as well as the merging of multiple universes to save reality by becoming a single, unified timeline. Fans have long wondered whether the events of “Crisis on Infinite Earths” might bring Supergirl and even Black Lightning to Earth-1, where the rest of the series take place. The crossover will also feature guest appearances by Tom Welling as Clark Kent, Erica Durance as Lois Lane, John Wesley Shipp as the Flash of Earth-90, Johnathon Schaech as Jonah Hex, Kevin Conroy as Bruce Wayne, and Ashley Scott as The Huntress.
“Crisis on Infinite Earths” kicks off on Sunday, December 8 on Supergirl, runs through a Monday episode of Batwoman and that Tuesday’s episode of The Flash. That will be the midseason cliffhanger, as the shows go on hiatus for the holidays and return on January 14 to finish out the event with the midseason premiere of Arrow and a “special episode” of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, which launches as a midseason series this year and so will not have an episode on the air before the Crisis.