The Arrowverse's next crossover adapts the fan-favorite 1985 comic Crisis on Infinite Earths by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez. The classic storyline is famous for being one of DC's biggest events ever, involving all of the characters in the publisher's pantheon in a single cosmic crisis taking place across an infinite number of parallel universes.
Now, that storyline comes to television under the watch of executive producer Greg Berlanti, among others. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Berlanti addressed the importance of bringing the classic storyline to the small screen.
First, Berlanti recognized the massive scope of the original comic book event. "It was a great way to get into all the characters at once because it was like a labyrinth of storytelling," he said. "You were starting to see how all of these characters were interconnected, and then that made you want to go and read the different issues that were happening and get into the different things."
Of course, when the seeds were first planted for the Arrowverse's own take on "Crisis on Infinite Earths," back in the pilot episode of The Flash, Berlanti had no idea if they would ever get to adapt it. "We weren’t sure we’d ever be allowed to [do our version of Crisis], or where we’d get to that place," the producer revealed. "It’s our iteration of it. It’s not necessarily what they’d end up doing in the film space, so we could advocate for it that way, in terms of permission.
"I never feel anything other than a sense of responsibility," Berlanti continued. "Whenever we do an iconic story line or we do something that reminds us really vividly of one of those books that meant a lot to us, we have a sense of pressure and obligation of ‘Oh wow, we really don’t want to mess this up’ even more so than we usually do. So that fear overrides any kind of other emotion."
The highly anticipated television event will feature the return of the Monitor, who previously brought grave warning about the coming of his brother, the Anti-Monitor in last year's crossover, "Elseworlds". The cosmic character was last seen at the end of Arrow's Season 7, when he recruited Oliver Queen for his mission across multiple universes.
Scheduled to air this fall on The CW, "Crisis on Infinite Earths" will involve Arrow, Supergirl, The Flash, DC's Legends of Tomorrow and Batwoman.