Arrow Spinoff Starring Katherine McNamara, Katie Cassidy & Juliana Harkavy Set As CW Backdoor Pilot

The CW is moving forward with another Arrow spinoff headlined by Katherine McNamara, Katie Cassidy and Juliana Harkavy reprising their Arrow roles in the new superhero series.

The new offshoot, which was teased at TCA by the CW boss Mark Pedowitz, will center around Mia Smoak, known as Green Arrow, and the Canaries Laurel Lance and Dinah Drake.

The project, which comes from Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros Television, is being set up as a backdoor pilot that will air as episode from the upcoming eighth and final season of Arrow. It will be written by Beth Schwartz, Marc Guggenheim, Jill Blankenship and Oscar Balderrama.

The new superhero squad is a next-generation version of Team Arrow with the costumed offspring of the original membership. At the center of the next-gen collective is Smoak, the fierce daughter of Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) aka Green Arrow, the central character of Arrow and the former mayor of Star City.

Smoak was introduced in the Season 7 episode Star City 2040, which was set in the future as the title suggests. Shes an intense maverick just like her dad but she knows little about her fathers history and she takes a dim view of the costumed vigilante traditions both of her family and her hometown.

That episode felt like a backdoor pilot itself and it ended with a stirring image of the cloaked Smoak holding a bow and poised for action. The character gets her intelligence from her mothers side: Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards) aka Overwatch, is her other parent.

A superhero baton handoff between Green Arrow and his daughter sounds like a strong foundation narrative for a new Arroverse series but it would take the DC Comics-based mythology into very similar story turf as the upcoming Disney+ Hawkeye series from Marvel Studios.

The Marvel series stars Jeremy Renner as the Avengers archery expert known as Hawkeye and centers on his training of his young female protege (played by Hailee Steinfeld).

The CWs The Flash also originally was developed as an Arrow planted spinoff before a decision was made to turn it into a standalone pilot.

McNamara starred in a recurring role as Mia Smoak in the seventh season of Arrow and was promoted to series regular for the forthcoming season. She is a street fighter-turned rebel leader that turned out to be The Green Arrow Oliver Queens daughter. Cassidy played Laurel Lances, the Black Canary, in the first four seasons of Arrow and was a special guest in season five before moving over to The Flash. She returned for season six of Arrow as Laurels doppelgänger Black Siren. Harkavy portrayed Dinah Drake, otherwise known as the Black Canary in the fifth season of the show and was promoted to series regular for seasons six and seven.

The spinoff comes after Pedowitz revealed in August that it was looking at another show set in the expanded Arrowverse, which has spawned titles Read More – Source