Ever since it was announced that Supergirl was going to be jumping from CBS to The CW to be alongside her other DC brethren The Flash, Arrow, and The Legends of Tomorrow, fans have been excited about the cross-pollination that is bound to happen. Shortly after the move was made official, it was announced that there was already a crossover planned for this fall. Today, thanks to some fresh insight from producer Greg Berlanti- who oversees all of these DC TV projects- we know exactly how epic an event to expect.

The plan sounds extremely cool, and fantastically ambitious.

According to Berlanti, in a chat with IndieWire, they’re treating the event like a three hour movie told across three shows. So this means it’s not going to be housed within a single series, but rather it’ll start in one series, continue into another, and then culminate in a third. It’s a very comic book-like approach, and one they’ve donein past Flash/Arrow crossovers, but this will undoubtedly be the grandest yet.

Here he is, in his own words, describing how Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow, and The Legends of Tomorrow will cross paths this fall:

“We just finished writing the fall crossovers. And now we’re trying to figure out how to produce them. That’s probably the most challenging thing we do all year. And now we’re doing it across three shows!”

“You really are trying to run a single production across three different productions. But they’re run as three separate entities. We have to figure out when we’re borrowing one actor from where. We’re telling one cohesive story; ‘Supergirl’ will participate, but the storyline doesn’t actively begin there. There are some characters who show up in her episode, but the story begins with ‘The Flash’ episode and goes to ‘Arrow’ and ‘Legends of Tomorrow.’ We’re just getting into designing the bad guy for it, and we start now but it doesn’t air until the end of November. We will put a lot of time between now and then figuring out visual effects sequences. Just today I was holding the three scripts back-to-back – that’s 180 pages of material. It’s a three-hour story, almost a miniseries.”

What’s telling about that answer is that it would appear that Supergirl won’t be one of the shows that houses the story, but rather that the character (played by Melissa Benoist) will be a part of the overall arc- possibly being the lead character that carries us through the three shows. That last thing is my own bit of speculation. 

Berlanti sounds excited about their ambitious plan:

“It’s very daunting when you hold [all three scripts] together like that. Each one of these pages is 10 hours of shooting and a visual effects extravaganza. But hopefully it feels like a great kind of crossover comic book sell.”

Lastly, I’ll leave you with an interesting bit on how Berlanti thinks the move to The CW will be beneficial for Supergirl:

“I just saw the director’s cut of the first episode, and I’m in as much love with the show as ever. It’s been challenging to figure out all the moving parts, moving the show across cities and across networks. But the reality is, I think the show is as strong as ever and it feels really seamless. People will not be able to tell that it’s not L.A. It feels like National City still. There are some new enhancements to the set that we were going to do anyway. Obviously some new charactersare coming to the show that we would have brought in anyway to the second season. And so I’m really pleased. CBS in their own wisdom recognized it, there’s no part of the show that’s fighting itself anymore. It has a youthfulness and appeal because of the age of the leading lady, and it gets to embrace that a touch more.”

The part of that answer that I find so revealing, and so intriguing, is his reference to the show “fighting itself.” It speaks to the mismatch that took place, having the younger skewing, lighthearted Supergirl on the more serious, adult, hard-hitting CBS network. It sounds like there was definitely a fair amount of compromising and work that went into making the series a better fit on that network, where as on The CW it can be exactly what it was always intended to be. 

Lots to look forward to, DC TV fans. 

If you had to pick, right this second, which DC franchise should continue and which should get rebooted- the Berlantiverse or the DCEU– which would you choose?

SOURCE: IndieWire