Superhero Fight Club 2.0 Explained: The CW's Four-Show DC Video

Superhero Fight Club 2.0 explained: what the video is

Every autumn, The CW launches its DC superhero lineup with a burst of promotional material, and in 2016 the centerpiece was a short, comic video called Superhero Fight Club 2.0. The idea built on a promo from the year before, the first Superhero Fight Club, which set the heroes and villains of Arrow and The Flash in a cage match. The sequel widened the roster to every DC series on the network: Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow.

The video was released in the first days of October 2016, after a short teaser the week before. It is light-hearted and cheesy by design. Coverage at the time noted that nobody really fights in it: the heroes practice and show off their moves in a training facility, while the group in the control room seems to enjoy it more than those on the floor. At the end, a villain is unleashed as a final opponent.

As a piece of marketing, it did something the trailers could not. The shows have different tones, Arrow the darkest and Legends of Tomorrow the silliest, and a joke-filled fight video let them share a frame without anyone having to explain the continuity.

Who appears in the video

The cast is large. On the floor are Green Arrow (Stephen Amell), The Flash (Grant Gustin), Supergirl (Melissa Benoist), the Atom (Brandon Routh), White Canary (Caity Lotz) and Firestorm (Franz Drameh). In support are Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards) and Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes), the tech specialists of Arrow and The Flash, along with John Diggle (David Ramsey) and the Martian Manhunter (David Harewood). On Supergirl, the Martian Manhunter lives under the name Hank Henshaw, so some coverage used that name.

The joke at the center is that Supergirl is the newcomer. She had spent her first season on CBS and was about to start her second on The CW, so the video doubles as an introduction to her new neighbors. Felicity and Cisco run the operation, and the clash plays out as a training exercise, not a story.

The four shows in the fall of 2016

Each series arrived with a different history. Arrow, the oldest, had been on the air since 2012 and was heading into its fifth season. The Flash, which began in 2014, was starting its third. Legends of Tomorrow, the youngest of the original trio, had debuted in January 2016 and was returning for a second season. Supergirl, which began on CBS in 2015, was starting over on a new network.

The CW gave each its own night. Supergirl aired on Mondays, The Flash on Tuesdays, Arrow on Wednesdays and Legends of Tomorrow on Thursdays, so the network could present a full week of DC programming. The fight club video worked as a trailer for that week as much as for any single show, and it explains why the premiere dates were announced alongside it.

Why Supergirl’s arrival mattered

Supergirl premiered in 2015 on CBS, and the move to The CW for its second season put it on the same network as Arrow, which had started in 2012, The Flash, from 2014, and Legends of Tomorrow, which had debuted in January 2016. The video makes that merger explicit. For fans, the reveal is that all four shows now share a roster, and the promised crossover would test how well they work together.

Supergirl’s inclusion also explains the tone. The series is the most optimistic of the group, and having its lead take part in a playful brawl with the others sets expectations for a crossover that leans toward adventure over gloom.

The Invasion! crossover

The video does not tell the story of the fall season. Its main purpose was to remind viewers that the four shows would cross over later in the year. That crossover turned out to be Invasion!, based on the DC comic storyline of the same name. It began in the final scene of the Supergirl episode “Medusa” on November 28, 2016, continued with The Flash on November 29, Arrow on November 30 and Legends of Tomorrow on December 1. The Arrow part was also that show’s 100th episode.

In the crossover, Barry Allen investigates a meteor crash near Central City and finds a Dominator spaceship. The Dominators, an alien race that first landed on Earth in the 1950s, are gathering information on metahumans and build a bomb meant to kill every metahuman on the planet. Barry recruits heroes from several teams, including Supergirl from Earth-38, to stop them. The fight club video is not part of that continuity, but it sets the same mood: a big, friendly team-up.

The Dominators abduct the US President, use a mind-control device on the heroes and later demand that Barry surrender himself. Tension also grows among the heroes over Barry’s habit of manipulating the timeline. The cast reads like a reunion: Barry, Cisco, Caitlin, Felicity, Martin Stein, Jax and Kara on the Flash side; Oliver, Thea, Sara Lance, Diggle and Ray Palmer on the Arrow side; and Mick Rory, Nate Heywood and Amaya Jiwe among the Legends. Malcolm Merlyn and Damien Darhk, two of Arrow’s former villains, also return.

What the video tells viewers about tone

The most useful thing about the video is the tone it sets. Superhero Fight Club 2.0 makes it clear that the four shows are going to be a little silly together. The format is a game: a control room, a floor of heroes, a villain at the end. Nothing in it asks the audience to know who is dating whom or which villain died last season, so a casual viewer can enjoy it as easily as a dedicated fan.

For the network, that accessibility was the goal. A team-up episode is easier to sell when viewers of one show do not feel locked out of another, and a sketch with five or six recognizable costumes is the quickest way to communicate that. The result was a promo that has aged as a friendly reminder of the era when four weekly series planned a single event together.

Who is who in Superhero Fight Club 2.0

Roster as reported when the video was released.

Fall 2016 premiere dates for the four CW shows

Dates and nights as announced alongside the video.

How to watch the Invasion! crossover in order

The four parts aired on The CW over four consecutive days in late 2016:

1. 01Monday, November 28, 2016: the closing scene of the Supergirl episode “Medusa” sets the crossover in motion.
2. 02Tuesday, November 29: The Flash, Part 1 of Invasion!, season 3 episode 8.
3. 03Wednesday, November 30: Arrow, Part 2, season 5 episode 8 and the show’s 100th episode.
4. 04Thursday, December 1: Legends of Tomorrow, Part 3, season 2 episode 7.

Verdict: a small joke with a clear job

Superhero Fight Club 2.0 does not tell much about the coming seasons, and it was never meant to. It offers some light-hearted humor in a franchise that spent much of the preceding years in darker territory, and it promises team-up episodes later in the season.

If there is a complaint, it is that the video leaves the biggest questions untouched. It does not preview a single storyline from the new seasons, and it does not show the villains the heroes would face. That is not a failure of the format. A promo like this is a handshake, not a briefing.

It is cheesy, and that is the point. The best marketing for a shared universe is a reason to want the heroes in the same room, and the video gives one in four minutes. A viewer who had skipped Supergirl could see her stand next to the Flash and feel the question answered: why not watch them together?

Years later, the video is a small time capsule of a moment when the CW’s DC shows were becoming a single story. It is worth a look for anyone following the lineup, and the premiere dates that came with it turned the promo into a calendar for a week of Monday-to-Thursday viewing.

For anyone who wants to revisit that fall, the video pairs well with the crossover episodes, which play out the same idea at full length and show what happens when the training room gives way to an actual alien threat.

Sources

• Arrowverse, Wikipedia — shows and crossover details