A Fan-Favorite DC Series Is About to Stream Free Just Months After Its Netflix Exit

If you went looking for Arrow on Netflix over the holidays and found a big empty space where Star City used to be, good news: Oliver Queen has a new home, and it will not cost you a dime.

Where Arrow is landing (and when)

Arrow hits Pluto TV on May 1. It is free to stream there (think free-with-ads), which is a nice pivot after the show's mid-December exit from Netflix. That exit was part of a broader wave of The CW shows cycling off the service. Not exactly a shock: the CW/DC library has been on a rolling timer for a while. Black Lightning left in February of last year, and Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow are expected to bow out later this year and next year, respectively.

What else is coming with it

Arrow will sit alongside a handful of CW-era comfort watches on Pluto, including Hart of Dixie and The 100, plus Everwood from The WB days. Pluto is also adding ABC's My Wife and Kids. The pitch here is pretty clear:

"be rediscovered by longtime fans - and discovered for the first time by younger viewers who are increasingly embracing the era"
- Pluto TV

Why Arrow still matters

Superhero TV has been around forever (Smallville ran a decade for a reason), but Arrow changed the shape of the field. It took a non-Batman, non-Superman headliner in Green Arrow and used him as the launch pad for an interconnected TV universe that actually felt like comics:

• 2012: Arrow debuts, reframing Oliver Queen as a grounded vigilante with a larger DC sandbox lurking just off-screen.
• 2014: The Flash spins out, with Grant Gustin's Barry Allen jumping from guest star to metahuman lead.
• Then: DC's Legends of Tomorrow assembles from Arrow and Flash favorites; Supergirl, Batwoman, and eventually Black Lightning are folded into the same shared continuity.
• Annual crossovers go big, culminating in Crisis on Infinite Earths, which proved you do not need a movie budget to pull off a multiverse romp that newcomers can follow.

It has been six years since Arrow ended, which somehow feels both recent and like a different lifetime of capes and cowls. Either way, the show's DNA is still all over the place. On TV, Max's The Penguin has been a buzzy Gotham detour, Peacemaker keeps doing its irreverent thing, and Lanterns is on deck to reintroduce the Green Lantern corner. On the film side, James Gunn 's Superman is the big swing, with Supergirl queued up right behind it. None of those projects connect directly to Arrow, but it is hard to ignore how much groundwork the series laid for audiences buying into longform, serialized superhero storytelling on the small screen.

The bottom line

If you have been waiting for a no-fuss way to revisit Star City (or finally see what the fuss was about), Pluto TV has you covered starting May 1. No subscription, just press play and let the salmon ladder montages do their thing.