The CW’s Arrowverse franchise is getting some new members: characters from its superhero series Black Lightning will be part of a major crossover event Crisis on Infinite Earths, which will see its other DC superhero shows Arrow, Batwoman, The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, and Supergirl team up this fall.

The CW says that show itself won’t take part in the crossover event (the existing Arrowverse shows will each contribute an episode), but some of Black Lightning’s characters will join the ranks of its other superheroes when the event kicks off in December and January 2020. The CW also announced that the show’s third season would debut a bit earlier than expected, on October 7th.

The crossover event will be loosely based on the 1985 crossover comic series, which rebooted the entire franchise at the time. The network also revealed that Kevin Conroy, who’s best known for voicing Batman in Batman: The Animated Series, will play an older version of Bruce Wayne in the event. Last month, it said that Brandon Routh, who played Superman in the 2006 film Superman Returns, would reprise the role for the upcoming Crisis on Infinite Earths event.

Initially, Black Lightning wasn’t considered part of the larger Arrowverse franchise. CW chief Mark Pedowitz noted when the show began that there was a practical reason for that: location. Black Lightning filmed in Atlanta, Georgia, while the rest of the franchise’s shows were produced in Vancouver, Canada. Traveling between the two cities was just too logistically difficult, it seems.

But given the scale of this latest crossover event, it seems that the CW has opted to make the effort to bring the characters into the story somehow. This isn’t the first time that the Arrowverse has brought in shows that were technically out of continuity, thanks in part to its embrace of a multiverse that encompassed other DC properties: the CW brought over Supergirl from CBS, and Legends of Tomorrow brought in Matt Ryan’s depiction of Constantine, after NBC canceled that character’s show. The show has also shared some continuity with the 1990 film The Flash. Presumably, the rest of DC’s film and television adaptations could be retroactively pulled in someday.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/4/20753928/black-lightning-arrowverse-the-cws-crisis-on-infinite-earth-crossover-event