The Arrowverse is heading to Chicago! In order to film the Gotham City scenes of the Elseworlds crossover event, production is leaving Vancouver, Canada, where filming usually takes place for all the shows, and heading to the Windy City.
Earlier this week, Twitter handle “Filming in Chicago”, which as the name suggests talks about what films and TV shows are being filmed in the third biggest city in the nation, posted a picture of a film notice for a show called “Gotham City”. Obviously, there is no show by that name, leaving fans and residents puzzled.
Whether it was confusion by whoever made the notice, since the scenes are supposed to represent Gotham, or whether it was a codename to keep paparazzi off the scent, Marc Guggenheim, longtime writer and producer of the Arrowverse, confirmed via Twitter that they were filming Gotham City scenes for the Elseworlds crossover event.
Fans who have done their homework will know that this isn’t the first time Chicago has stood for the Dark Knight’s city before. Christopher Nolan used the city to represent the crime ridden town in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, before moving on to Pittsburgh and New York City for Rises.
It is much more affordable for production to take place in Vancouver, so it’s curious that they would go to Chicago for Gotham. Perhaps it is because they wanted to really make Gotham feel different and Chicago made a great Gotham before. Maybe it’s a nod to Nolan’s history there, since Arrow originally was inspired by the hyper-realism of Nolan’s vision before superpowers got introduced. It will be interesting to see if Batwoman gets her own series on the CW, whether they will continue to use Chicago in the future.
The Elseworlds event will be starting on The Flash on December 9th, continuing in Arrow on December 10th and concluding on Supergirl on December 11th.
During the event, our heroes will be facing off against John Deegan, a doctor at Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane.