It's took three years, and it survived David Zaslav's axe. Before we watch the series debut on August 1st, let's take a moment to remember how we got here.
I write these words within hours of the first full trailer for Batman: Caped Crusader being released by Prime Video. I’ve seen the trailer multiple times, having taken the opportunity to create dozens of screen captures for the multiple articles I plan to write about it over the next several weeks, knowing full well that I’ll end up replacing them once I have access to the full, HD quality episodes August 1st. However, even as I anticipate the release of the first Batman animated series in eleven years (2013’s all-but-forgotten Beware the Batman), I cannot help but reflect on what a long, hard slog this has been since the show was first announced three years ago.
Now, to be fair, a series such as Caped Crusader needs time to develop for it to achieve a certain level of quality. After all, the original Batman: The Animated Series gestated for two years, beginning November 1990 (Trumbull 2), before it debuted on September 5, 1992 (“Batman: The Animated Series”). By comparison, Batman Beyond had roughly a year from announcement to debut—it was originally announced January 12, 1998 (“Kids!”) and first aired January 10, 1999 (“Batman Beyond”)—and, while popular, the series did suffer from its lack of development time. No doubt the creative team wanted to get their new project just right.
(And I must admit a certain impatience on my part. After all, it was the tease of a BTAS reboot that motivated me to return to the sexy, fast-paced world of animation essayist in the first place. It had been seventeen years since I last wrote for The Justice League Watchtower, but speculation about the series prompted me to write eight essays on what a true BTAS reboot would look like. Granted, Timm and company went another way, but it was a stimulating exercise, nonetheless.)
In anticipation of the series’ debut on Prime Video in several weeks, I wanted to take a moment to look back at our journey back to Gotham City.
2021
As it often does in Hollywood, this story began with a rumor. On the January 16th installment of Kevin Smith’s Fat Man Beyond podcast, our man Silent Bob and his co-host, Marc Bernardin, revealed that there was talk of a Batman: The Animated Series revival on HBO Max. “I’m not involved, but I too have heard this, and I’ve heard this from very reliable people,” Smith said, adding, “I think that’s gonna happen, and how fucking amazing would that be because you can just literally pick up and keep going. It’s not, like, ‘Oh, we gotta explain why everyone’s older.’ It’s fucking animation, man, so you can go right back to those amazing fucking stories.”
As it turns out, Smith’s claims were pretty accurate, as a recent IGN article confirmed that, initially, bringing back BTAS was the plan. According to staff writer Jesse Schedeen, “originally Warner Bros. approached [BTAS creator / Executive Producer Bruce] Timm with the idea of reviving Batman: The Animated Series and picking up where The New Batman Adventures left off in 1999.” During a time period that also saw the announcement of other animated reboots—including Futurama, Beavis and Butt-Head, and X-Men ’97—this move could potentially have been a win for Warner Bros., allowing them to cash in on the seemingly never-ending wave of nostalgia programming.
And a reboot of BTAS / TNBA could have worked on another level, considering how the original series ended. After all, according to Vulture’s “An Oral History of Batman: The Animated Series,” the show was cancelled specifically so the creative team could focus on Batman Beyond, despite the fact that it was still doing quite well. According to Timm:
We get a call from the head of Kids’ WB, Jamie Kellner, and he liked what we were doing with the shows, but he wanted to figure out a way to make the shows even more kid friendly. At that time, one of the big shows on the WB was [Buffy the Vampire Slayer], and so everything he was saying was kind of moving us in that direction. […] Jamie literally, at one point in a meeting, said, “What if we made Batman a teenager?” And we all freaked out. We tried to keep a straight face, because you don’t want to say to the head of the WB network, “That’s a really stupid idea!” But we were all thinking it. So, it was, “Well, we’ll think about that!” Actually, I—at that meeting—threw out the idea of, “Well, maybe if the original Batman, Bruce Wayne, got too old to be Batman, and he had to kind of pass the Batman mantle onto a young kid, and then he’s gonna be like the old samurai passing on his wisdom to a young student and everything.” And Jamie really liked that idea, and then we walked out, and we said, “God, what the hell are we going to do?”
[…] And the more we started talking about it, the more we liked it. We met with Jamie again; we pitched him our idea of the show. Then he said, “Great! You’ve got a green light. Now, go make that show.” And we said, “But what about this Batman show that we’re doing right now?” And he says, “Well, we’ll cancel that one, and now you have to make Batman Beyond instead.” And it’s like, “Well, okay.” (qtd. in Riesman)
And even as they grew to love Batman Beyond, there was some regret at the loss of their original series. Said TNBA executive producer and writer Paul Dini:
That was heartbreaking to us, because we really looked upon these as very multidimensional characters, and [we] would have loved to have done at least another two or three years of [TNBA] along those lines. Especially because you can go back to the villains and develop them even further and take them in new areas. But they weren’t having it. (qtd. in Riesman)
That said, Bruce Timm passed on the pitch (Schedeen), not wanting to do a simple retread of what had come before (as he said in a 2002 World's Finest interview, "I hate to repeat myself"; qtd. in Harvey). Still, the idea stuck with him, and he came around when discussing the series with fellow Executive Producer James Tucker, who himself created the more Silver Age-oriented Batman: The Brave and the Bold series:
James and I were talking about it and James was saying, “Well, if you didn’t want to go back and make new episodes of BTAS, was there anything that you didn’t get to do the first time that you would rather do this time if you had the choice?” […] We started talking about it, and it turned out there actually were a lot of things that, the more I started thinking back on, it was like, “Oh yeah.” I had a completely different idea of what the world was like and what Batman himself was like. (qtd. in Schedeen)
This reimagining came further into focus when filmmaker J.J. Abrams and The Batman director Matt Reeves joined the project as executive producers. The series became Batman: Caped Crusader, a series distinctly different from Timm’s original work. Think of it this way: if BTAS and the larger DCAU is Earth-1, Caped Crusader would be Earth-2, with a new Dark Knight, a new Gotham City, and a new supporting cast independent of what came before.
Officially announced in May 2021 (Holub), we would get our first official details about the series at DC FanDome, a virtual event established due to traditional conventions being cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic (Vary, “DC”). In a prerecorded clip aired during the October 16th event (Hipes), Timm laid out his plans for the new series:
One of my elevator pitch versions of this show is that it’s more Batman: The Animated Series than Batman: The Animated Series. […] There were certain limitations on what we can do in terms of adult content, in terms of violence and adult themes. My idea is basically to say, “Okay, it’s 1990 again, I get to do what I want to do this time, and I got J.J. [Abrams] and Matt [Reeves] backing me up.”
[…] What this does is that it gives us the opportunity to say, “Okay, well, the versions of Joker and Catwoman and Penguin—those versions that we did on Batman: The Animated Series were really great and iconic, but there’s lots of different ways we can take those characters that we hope will be just as iconic and just as powerful.”
[…] The show will definitely [be] heavy on the German expressionism / film noir kind of styling, set in a kind of timeless ‘40s world. If anything, we’re probably going to lean into that even more in terms of authentic clothes and hairstyles and hats and vehicles and architecture. The way we deal with the characters, [however], is going to be quite a bit more modern in terms of inclusivity, representation … things like that. (qtd. in “DC FanDome 2021”)
And so, with a team of experienced talent helmed by the man who tempered the Dark Knight 30 years prior, Caped Crusader began to develop. However, the series would suffer a major blow in the unlikely form of a corporate merger.
2022-2023
The series would gain an early win in January 2022 when it was announced that acclaimed writer Ed Brubaker had joined the creative team as head writer and executive producer (Kit). A veteran of crime fiction (Scene of the Crime, Criminal), Brubaker is also well-known for his work on Batman titles, such as Batman (2000-2003), Catwoman (2001-2005) and the police procedural Gotham Central (2002-2006). However, despite this strong stable of talent, the show—along with everything else produced by Warner Bros.—would be thrown for a loop when its parent company, called WarnerMedia following its 2018 acquisition by AT&T (Robins), was sold in April 2022 to Discovery, Inc., forming Warner Bros. Discovery (Maas).
Once the dust settled, the new president and CEO, David Zaslav, began his attempts to make the new company profitable, and part of that was dealing with $48.6 billion in debt (“Warner”). Unfortunately, he chose to do so with a hatchet. Suddenly, nearly-completed movies—such as Batgirl, Coyote vs. Acme, and Scoob! Holiday Haunt (co-written by DCAU alum Paul Dini)—were forever shelved to allow the company to take a tax-write off (Vary, “’Batgirl’”; Phillips). But the areas hardest hit were kids and animated programs (ones not named Harley Quinn, at any rate), as multiple animated shows were pulled from HBO Max, including Infinity Train, Aquaman: King of Atlantis, Summer Camp Island, and The Fungies! (White; Carey). And sadly, it was during the culling that Caped Crusader was announced as one of its victims.
Well, not exactly. You see, it was reported that the Batman series, along with several other projects that were already well into production, would be shopped around to potentially air on other streaming services (Mitovich). This was immediately followed up by a Tweet from Hollywood Reporter writer Borys Kit, who claimed that the series was “deep in production, nothing is paused. It will show up somewhere.” And, as the Heat Vision blog reported that Apple, Hulu, and Netflix all expressed “intense interest” in picking up the series, there was hope.
Despite this, it would be another seven to eight months until it was announced that Amazon’s Prime Video had picked up the series, along with the film Merry Little Batman and its spin-off, Bat-Family (“Prime”). However, while we were relieved that it still endured, there was still little information about the show, and no announcement of a premiere date. Of course, this was likely delayed due to the turmoil in the form of the Writer's Guild of America strike (May 2nd to September 27th) and the SAG-AFTRA strike (July 14th to November 9th) that slowed Hollywood to a crawl but was necessary to ensure that people who work in the entertainment industry get treated fairly. In fact, it was also during this period that production workers at Warner Bros. Animation and Cartoon Network successfully unionized with the Animation Guild, a process that began in July 2023 (Kilkenny) and was formally recognized by Warner Bros. Discovery in December of that year (Patten).
2024
After three years of silence and a near-cancellation by its parent company, it was almost a relief when a leak occurred in March 2024 where some production images began showing up on social media. They were quickly removed, but their presence persisted on Google and Reddit. Now, I’m not going to post the images here (it’s inappropriate and, besides, kind of redundant now), but I will say that they were character models of villains, specifically Two-Face, the Gentleman Ghost, Clayface, Catwoman, Onomatopoeia, Natalia Knight (the real name of Nocturna), and Harley Quinn in both her costumed and civilian guises (though Harleen Quinzel was falsely labeled as “Renee Montoya”). These were accompanied by a few screenshots, one of which containing a rather stout version of Alfred.
Fast forward to May and June of this year, where fans have received official pics of the series, as well as descriptions of the characters and an actual, honest-to-God release date of August 1st. Voice actors have been [partially] revealed, and a pair of videos have been released, including a teaser providing not only the identities of two additional villains for the show—Firebug and the Penguin—but also a sample of the new voice of Batman / Bruce Wayne, Hamish Linklater:
And, days later, a full trailer featuring a sizzle reel of Season One:
And that brings us up to the present. With the series’ debut only a month away, information about the show is coming out rather fast. In a few days, I’ll be posting an article summarizing what we already know about this Gotham City and its denizens, and I plan on doing episode recaps once they air (not all at once, of course). Until then, enjoy the anticipation, and I’ll keep you informed as we have our countdown to Caped Crusader.
Works Cited
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Images courtesy of Prime Video, Warner Bros. Discovery, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, and DC Comics. YouTube videos courtesy of the World's Finest and Prime Video channels.
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