David Goyer on his shelved Green Arrow film which was “ahead of its time”

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Years before Arrow was a show on The CW and we getting half a dozen superhero films hitting theaters annually, David Goyer was trying to get GREEN ARROW: ESCAPE FROM SUPER MAX off the ground. Goyer, along with Justin Marks, penned a Green Arrow screenplay which would have seen the emerald archer framed for the assassination of a high-ranking government official and sent to a super max prison packed with villains.The project would ultimately drift into development hell but with the current state of superhero films and the arrival of SUICIDE SQUAD, David Goyer told Den of Geek that the film was "completely ahead of its time."

Much like the upcoming SUICIDE SQUAD, GREEN ARROW: ESCAPE FROM SUPER MAX would have included a prison full of villains such as Lex Luther, The Riddler, and The Joker, but Goyer said that the "oddball" project was never fully accepted by the higher-ups at Warner Bros.

The executive on it was really visionary, but the higher-ups, none of whom are at Warner Bros any more, just thought at the time, you know, we just want to make Batman and Superman movies. We don’t want to make any other characters. But this is before Marvel had really taken off, before more obscure projects like Guardians Of The Galaxy or Ant-Man or things like that had huge success, before the current gold rush I guess, if you will. It’s natural that eventually someone was going to make a villain movie, so that’s just what happened!

I suppose Goyer has had the last laugh, as he and Zack Snyder are now overseeing the growing DC Cinematic Universe and could very well put a Green Arrow feature film back into development. Would you have liked to have seen GREEN ARROW: ESCAPE FROM SUPER MAX or does the character work better on CW's Arrow?

SUICIDE SQUAD will be released on August 5, 2016.