If you squint hard enough, you can almost see him: the man in green tights, a quiver full of metaphorical arrows, lurking somewhere in the dusty backlog of Warner Bros. IP rights. But according to James Gunn—the self-appointed town crier of the DC Universe—Green Arrow isn’t so much missing in action as he is missing in canon. “Not part of our system right now,” Gunn chirped recently, in that casual, PR-poised way people announce the death of your favorite childhood pet.
For those keeping score, Gunn clarified that Season 1 of Peacemaker was basically improv night at the karaoke bar: name-drops, cameos, jokes, all fair game, none canon. Yes, that means the Green Arrow gag—the one where he’s accused of being a guy who sneaks into furry conventions in full cosplay—isn’t real in the DCU. (Apologies to the thousands of Tumblr fan-artists who had already drawn it in exquisite, terrifying detail.) Season 2, Gunn insists, will fold properly into the rebooted DCU, but the archer himself? Still stuck in limbo, somewhere between Robin Hood and your drunk uncle at the Renaissance Festival.
Why Green Arrow Doesn’t Matter (Yet)
The official line: the DCU is focusing on big-ticket items like Superman, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and Lanterns. Translation: studio executives can still explain those names to their board of directors without pulling out a flowchart. Green Arrow? Not so much. He’s an archer in a world where people literally shoot lasers from their eyes. He’s basically “Batman, but Etsy,” and Warner Bros. has enough Batmen already stacked in the studio freezer.
But there’s a more uncomfortable truth humming under the surface: Green Arrow is too political for the sanitized superhero age. Canonically, he’s a champagne socialist with a goatee sharp enough to slice your HOA bylaws in half. He lectures billionaires while being one, shoots arrows at oil companies, and once staged a full-on road trip with Green Lantern that was less “superhero comic” and more “Kerouac with spandex.”
That doesn’t exactly fit the Peacemaker model of guns, butt jokes, and awkward dance sequences.
James Gunn’s New Religion: Continuity As Controlled Chaos
Gunn has been clear: the DCU is not beholden to the sins of the past. That means everything pre-Superman: Legacy is subject to revision, retcon, or being casually memory-holed like Justice League: Snyder Cut discourse at Thanksgiving dinner.
For Green Arrow, this creates a particularly tragicomic scenario. He was never part of the Snyderverse (unless you count a handful of vague Arrowverse cameos that Warner Bros. would prefer you didn’t mention in front of polite company). He wasn’t in Peacemaker Season 1, beyond that joke. And now, according to Gunn, he doesn’t even technically exist. It’s like DC looked at their roster and decided: “We’d rather put Calendar Man in the lineup than deal with a guy who could double as a guest columnist for Jacobin.”
The Fan Meltdown: A Greek Tragedy in Real Time
Predictably, fans reacted to Gunn’s Green Arrow shrug the way fans always do—with memes, death threats, and dissertations longer than their college theses. Reddit lit up with posts titled things like:
- “So you’re telling me Booster Gold gets canonized before GA??”
- “Just admit you hate Oliver Queen, James”
- “This is why Marvel wins.”
Twitter (or whatever we’re calling it now that Elon Musk has replaced the bird logo with a clipart goat) produced its usual civil war. Half of DC fandom insists Green Arrow is essential—“He’s the conscience of the Justice League!”—while the other half points out that Arrow, the CW’s flagship soap opera about abs and leather, already wrung the IP dry. (Seriously, Stephen Amell shot so many arrows in slow motion that OSHA should have intervened.)
The truth is more banal: Warner Bros. doesn’t know how to sell him. Archers don’t move merch. Try explaining to a toy executive why kids should buy a plastic bow and arrow when Spider-Man has 17 different web shooters.
The Irony of Erasure
What makes this erasure especially delicious is that Green Arrow is arguably the most DC character to ever DC. He is—brace yourself—a Batman rip-off, intentionally created in the 1940s because publishers realized one rich vigilante wasn’t enough. He had a “Green Car,” a “Green Cave,” even a “Green Signal.” He was, essentially, Batman: The Organic Farmers’ Market Edition.
And yet, through sheer stubbornness, he evolved into something iconic: the loudmouth lefty of the Justice League, the guy who would actually call Superman a “corporate stooge” to his face. In other words, the perfect counterbalance to DC’s otherwise humorless parade of alien gods and brooding billionaires.
That’s the guy Gunn doesn’t want in the system right now. Which is hilarious, because if you’ve watched Peacemaker, you know Gunn lives for characters who call BS out loud. It’s like he’s allergic to letting Oliver Queen do what Oliver Queen does best—heckle the room into discomfort.
The Broader DCU Problem: Too Many Cooks, Not Enough Arrows
Let’s zoom out. The DCU reboot is supposed to fix the chaos of the last decade: too many Batmen, too many Jokers, and a cinematic universe that looked less like a master plan and more like a group project where nobody shared Google Docs access. Gunn’s plan is to unify it all, one carefully curated character at a time.
That means somebody has to stay on the bench. And right now, it’s Green Arrow. Not because he’s unworthy, but because in a universe of super-soldiers, gods, and talking sharks, the guy with a bow just doesn’t clear the spectacle threshold.
Never mind that Hawkeye already proved audiences will watch an archer if the story is there. Never mind that Green Arrow’s politics make him uniquely relevant in an era where billionaires literally own space. Gunn has chosen his saints, and Oliver Queen is not among them.
The Real Conspiracy Theory
Let’s indulge in some satire-tinged speculation: maybe Green Arrow isn’t “in the system” because James Gunn himself knows he can’t outdo the CW. Say what you will about Arrow, but it gave us Felicity Smoak, a salmon ladder, and more leather pants than a Berlin nightclub. It also burned through half of DC’s villain roster before the films even had a chance.
By the time Oliver Queen fought Ra’s al Ghul, even Batman fans were like, “Wait, did we miss a memo?” Gunn probably looked at that and thought, Better to pretend Green Arrow never existed than fight through eight seasons of CW canon in therapy.
Meanwhile, in the Multiverse…
There’s also the small matter of the multiverse—a narrative crutch DC is already addicted to. If fans scream loud enough, Gunn can always yank a Green Arrow out of some timeline later. Maybe it’ll be a gritty HBO Max miniseries called Emerald Liberal. Maybe it’ll be a cameo in Lanterns, where Oliver shows up to remind Hal Jordan he’s a cop. Maybe it’ll be an animated tie-in, voiced by Chris Pratt, because apparently we can’t escape him.
The point is: nothing is ever gone. Green Arrow isn’t dead; he’s just in IP purgatory.
Closing Shot
So here we are. James Gunn has drawn his line in the sand, and Oliver Queen is on the wrong side of it. No canon status, no project, no casting rumors—just the faint echo of a furry joke in Peacemaker and a fandom that refuses to let the quiver gather dust.
Will Green Arrow return? Almost certainly. But for now, the DCU is a world without him. And in a way, that’s the most Green Arrow story of all: the loudmouth hero sidelined by people in power who can’t handle what he represents.
Somewhere, Oliver Queen is sipping a craft beer, glaring at a news chyron about billionaires buying democracy, and waiting for his call-up. And when it comes, he’ll have an arrow labeled “I told you so.”