Exclusive: Black Canary Movie Will Introduce Green Arrow, Setup Spinoff Film

We've exclusively learned that Black Canary movie will introduce Green Arrow for DC's films.

By Faith McKay | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

black canary

A few days ago, news came of a Black Canary movie currently in development. This movie is going to star Jurnee Smollett, the actress who brought the DC character to live-action in Birds of Prey with Margot Robbie. The movie will be written by Misha Green, who has worked with Smollett previously on Lovecraft Country. Like Batgirl and Blue Beetle, the Black Canary movie will be available exclusively on HBO Max for streaming. All around, this has been very exciting news, with great details–except that they haven’t told audiences anything about what the story will include. So, we consulted our trusted and proven inside sources who thankfully did some work for us. We have now learned that the Black Canary movie will include Green Arrow.

Just like how Birds of Prey mainly focused on Harley Quinn as the main character, introducing Black Canary for this new spinoff, this new film will introduce Green Arrow for his own eventually spinoff movie. At least, that’s the plan at DC right now. We weren’t able to learn if they are going to take their time and see how audiences react to the Green Arrow character before moving forward on the spinoff project, or get working on that movie as soon as possible to have the films release closer together. At this time, it seems most likely that the Green Arrow movie will also release exclusively on HBO Max, although we weren’t able to confirm that’s for sure their plan at this point.

In DC comics, Green Arrow and Black Canary have a long history together, so introducing him in her film makes a lot of sense. They’ve also teamed up in video games. Their relationship has been romantic. In fact, they’ve even been married in some of the video games and comic books. Prior to their wedding in the comics, he yearned for them to get married and have children. Her response was, “Aren’t I enough?”.

Black Canary Green Arrow

Their rocky relationship has had a lot of stops and starts. A lot of that stems from them having different desires in their lives. That seems to lead to Black Canary not trusting Green Arrow, sometimes with him seeming to cheat on her and sometimes with him ending up in jail for doing things he didn’t tell her about first. That said, fans are typically rooting for them. Despite their problems, their love for one another is always clear.

This relationship between Black Canary and Green Arrow, if successfully adapted from the comics, makes it easy to introduce Arrow in the movie starring Jurnee Smollett, show their romance, and then still have the pair split, possibly on perfectly good terms. It will be interesting to see if Misha Green (the writer of the Black Canary film) will decide to include their full romantic relationship, or only flirt with the idea that they could get together someday.

Green Arrow has been seen on shows like Smallville and of course in the Arrowverse on The CW, where he was played by Stephen Amell. It seems unlikely that he’ll be playing the character for HBO Max, since that would connect The CW’s Arrowverse with the DC Extended Universe, complicating storylines. Right now, Misha Green is working on the script, and may or may not become the director for the project. They are a little ways off from confirming any actors for the role of Oliver Queen (Green Arrow). Certainly, fancasting for the role will begin soon, warming us up for when the studio chooses the actor to take on the role.