Tales From Development Hell: Green Arrow: Escape From Super Max
- 6 days ago
- 9 min read
By Ryan Fleming.
There are some films that are ahead of their time and perhaps not appreciated upon release. There are others that missed their moment and are dated on arrival. The same is true for films that are never made. Some scripts might not get a look in until the market is seemingly more receptive: Alien (1979) being one such example only picked up after the success of Star Wars (1977). Others might languish so long that what would have been groundbreaking is now past its prime like The Two Jakes (1990), sequel to Chinatown (1974).
Can a film be simultaneously ahead of its time and too late? There are a few that might fit the bill, both made and unmade. One of the latter being Green Arrow: Escape from Super Max.
At a time when it seems almost every comic book superhero and their dog has been adapted into a major Hollywood film, Green Arrow remains conspicuous by his absence. This was not inevitable. Had things gone differently, he might have been adapted at a time when only a mere handful of DC characters had made it to the big screen. If anything, the bigger incongruity might have been Green Arrow receiving the big screen treatment in 2008. The character had never been one of DC’s biggest properties, certainly much more obscure than the likes of the Flash or Green Lantern. This was at a time too when Warner Bros, who owned the rights to DC characters, were loath to adapt any of them beyond Batman and Superman. Even those two could miss as much as hit on the big screen, and their efforts outside of them – the likes of Steel (1997) and Catwoman (2004) – were roundly criticised and box office disappointments.
Name recognition of the character did not necessarily mean a film would be unsuccessful to anyone paying attention, however. Witness Marvel’s Blade (1998), a commercial success that spawned a trilogy. It would be the writer of that trilogy, and director of its third film, that would attempt to bring Green Arrow to the big screen in Escape from Super Max.
David S. Goyer first became involved in DC adaptations in 2003 when he signed on to script a Batman film. Warner Bros. sought to bring that franchise back from the nadir it fell into with Batman & Robin (1997). The eventual film, Batman Begins (2005) would reboot the franchise to tell Batman’s origin story and go on to become a massive success. It also brought the ‘reboot’ term into popular usage for film franchise that discard prior continuity, with Goyer using the term in reference to comic books during a 2005 interview. At the same time as Goyer and Nolan began developing a sequel to Batman Begins, then-unknown screenwriter Justin Marks had an idea to bring DC’s Green Arrow to the big screen. Goyer also became involved in Marks’ project, which would see the archer superhero framed and locked up the titular prison, having to find a way to escape and clear his name. Their ideas showed a radical departure from the character established in the comic books and definitely speaks to the trends in comic book films around that time.
Oliver Queen would only feature as Green Arrow, as in costumed and under that alias, in the opening of the film. After his arrest and unmasking, he would be referred to as Oliver Queen for the remainder of the film. He’d also be shorn of his trademark hair and goatee upon his imprisonment, though the green prisoner boiler suit would show a nod to his old costume. Recognising his unique talents, Queen would be sent to no ordinary prison but one specifically designed to hold metahumans, evil geniuses, and the otherwise preternaturally skilled. Queen would be faced with many of the people he helped put away, mostly drawn from the lower echelons of DC’s villainous population. There would however be cameos or easter eggs of big hitters like the Joker, Lex Luthor, or the Riddler throughout. Like Queen, most of these villains would be referred to by their driver’s licence name rather than their trade names. That would be reflected in the true villains of the film, newly created corporate baddies who want to take control of Queen’s assets. The closest the film has to a proper villain drawn from the comics is the very grounded Amanda Waller, here turned from high-ranking government official to the Super Max warden.
It was an intriguing idea, and one that would make its way into more than one DC property later, but long after Super Max itself was dropped in favour of different directions for Warner Bros. DC films. Superhero films were changing whilst Escape from Super Max was edging towards production. Two landmark films released in 2008 would usher in that change and spell doom for the Green Arrow project.
One of the two would, ironically, be penned by David S. Goyer himself. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight would become the highest-grossing film of 2008 and set a new standard for the genre. It abandoned many of the typical things done in comic book adaptations to that time, even in its own predecessor, and the seriousness with which it treated its plot was lauded by many reviewers. The other film actually bore some comparisons to Super Max, particularly in its rejection of the secret identity aspect, tying together different properties from the same source material, and being based on one of the less prominent superheroes: Iron Man. Where that film differed radically from Super Max was that the intertextual elements common to the source material but not done often in their film adaptations (usually due to the rights to different characters being held by different companies) was intended to user in a whole new series of interconnected adaptations. Between these two releases, superhero films, comic book adaptations, and film franchises in general were radically changed from what had come before.
DC has long had an issue in playing catch-up to Marvel ever since the latter became the gold standard for superheroes in the 1960s. That need to constantly compete with the competition on the competition’s terms would translate into their respective film adaptations. If Marvel could have their Cinematic Universe, then DC could have their own. One might think that they had a waiting script to launch that with Super Max. Instead, the Green Arrow film just petered out until Goyer and Marks stopped talking about it in interviews.
Goyer would remain involved in other DC adaptations, contributing to The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and scripting Man of Steel (2013). The latter was actually intended to kick off DC’s shared universe, with several references to other DC properties. It was a second attempt at it following the overwhelmingly negative reception to Green Lantern (2011). The stop/start and constant reboots would become the norm for Warner Bros.’s attempt to do their own equivalent of the MCU with the DC characters. Though many films were made with many, many DC characters popping up, Green Arrow never appeared in any of them, but the character did not lack for adaptations.
From 2012 to 2020, Green Arrow would be the main character of The CW programme Arrow, with Stephen Amell playing the title character. Arrow would usher in its own expanded universe of television series followed by The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, Black Lightning, and Batwoman. Oliver Queen would even be sent to prison across seasons 6 and 7 of Arrow.
That would not be the only DC adaptation to feature elements seemingly drawn from the Super Max concept. Though the video game Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009) owes much more to Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989), Bruce Wayne being wrongfully arrested and sent to the titular Batman: Arkham City (2011) feels similar to Oliver Queen’s situation in Super Max. Similarly, Suicide Squad (2016) brought together many minor villains from across the DC properties in the same way Super Max would have. They were even brought together under the auspices of Amanda Waller, the very same character intended to serve as the warden of Super Max. Both Arkham Asylum and the Suicide Squad predate the Super Max script in the comics, but that future adaptations went back to these concepts perhaps speaks to their potential.
Could their potential have been met if Green Arrow: Escape from Super Max had been filmed and released in the late 2000s? How would the film have been received, and could it have changed the trajectory of superhero films?
Perhaps the simplest way for it to be filmed is if production is sufficiently along by the time Iron Man and The Dark Knight is released, so that production could be fulfilled before Warner Bros. went back to the drawing board. As much as those two films might have set a new direction for superhero films and comic adaptations, it was really a bifurcation based on the very separate tones and intents of those two films. A bifurcation DC was never able to reconcile as they tried to do an MCU style interconnected franchise with the dark tones of Nolan’s Batman films.
Where would Super Max fit in either direction? It probably wouldn’t. For as much as it might eschew some elements of the Green Arrow character like the costume, archery, and Black Canary for most of the film, it still features a prison where one of the inmates (Cameron Mahkent, aka Icicle) can control and generate cold. In that respect, it feels far closer to what came before it than what came later. The minimal costumes and noms de cape have more of the feel of the successful 2000s superhero film series that began with X-Men (2000). It’s a balance that began to diverge more and more in the wake of the 2008 releases. This is where even being released in the wake of those two films might make it seen as more of a relic than something ground-breaking.
Regardless, DC might still want their own interconnected series of films and they accidentally have the exact thing in production. A film that only touches upon some of the more prominent characters they might want to save for later, bigger pictures, but Super Max would definitely take place in a world where Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Superman, and Teen Titans can all be assumed to exist due to some of their lesser villains being amongst the incarcerated. What Super Max also might allow them to do is to abandon the need for an origin story, something that almost all superhero films still had to feature at that point. It might have been a brave decision to do this for what was a relatively obscure character. Instead, Oliver Queen’s transformation into Green Arrow stranded on a desert island would have been conveyed in a series of flashbacks. This is something that Warner Bros. seemingly learned too late in their film adaptations. Did Man of Steel really have to retell the familiar Superman origin story in full? With the Super Max format as an example, would they have been more willing to drop audiences right into the action?
It’s possible, but it’s just as possible that even if Super Max were well underway in production and released that the powers that be at Warner Bros. still decide to roll the dice on a complete overhaul of their planned films based on the DC characters. After all, they did already have the script on hand and under development when they decided to change course historically. Then there is how Super Max might be received. As mentioned, its midway point in the tones of The Dark Knight and Iron Man might actually harm it. It would be neither fish nor fowl, and the liberties taken with the look of the title and even the name of the title character might incense the most vocal sections of the fanbase when comparable films were taking less liberties than had been done previously. There is perhaps a comparison to be made with Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009). This too was an atypical superhero film for the time that had the misfortunate to come out at a time when the industry had already left it behind. Green Arrow's tale might join Snyder’s Watchmen and Mystery Men (1999), in being a superhero film ahead of its time yet too imbued with what had come before it to be truly groundbreaking.
Many of the works that wound up using similar elements to the Super Max concept, including Arrow, the Arkham video games, and Suicide Squad might also be radically different where the concept made it to film.
Green Arrow never made it to film at a time when it looked like it was far closer than many other comic superheroes because the industry happened to change at the exact point when it could have happened. The timing might still have been perfect, and it had exactly where one direction of that change seemed to be heading, yet it still never happened. With so many superhero films released since then, perhaps Green Arrow: Escape from Super Max might have just become another footnote in the history of that genre.
Even so, the concept remains an enticing one. A last hurrah for something different before a decade of everyone trying to do the same thing.
Ryan Fleming is the author of SLP's Reid in Braid and various short stories for the anthologies, as well as editing The Scottish Anthology.
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