At New York Comic Con, I was able to sit down with Producer Bruce Timm and Casting Director Andrea Romano to discuss Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Part 1 and 2, and the enduring legacy of Batman: The Animated Series.
Bruce Timm and his team meet every week with people from Warner Home Video, DC Comics and Warner Brothers Animation in order to discuss everything that’s in production and what they might want to put into production. The idea of doing an adaptation of Batman: The Dark Knight returns was first brought up when DC began producing animated movies. There was some objection to it at the time, and they did other projects. The idea didn’t come up again until a couple of years ago, in between Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight’s release and the start of production on The Dark Knight Rises. There was concern that Christopher wanted to use The Dark Knight Returns for The Dark Knight Rises, so they had to again, not move forward with an animated Dark Knight Returns movie. Later on, once The Dark Knight Rises was in production, DC said it was different enough from The Dark Knight Returns to do an adaptation. “I jumped on it,” said Bruce Timm.
According to Bruce, it’s tricky finding the right project to pitch. “Sometimes we’ll have a favorite Batman comic that we loved as a kid or a teenager, and we’ll throw the idea out, but not all of those make good movies.” He went on to explain that with the realities of the marketplace is that even with the tight budget they work with, the movies still cost X millions of dollars. “The Home Video people want a sure thing. That means you’re going to get a lot of Batman movies, a lot of Superman movies, a lot of Justice League movies. I’m hoping that something happens along the way that allows us to broaden our horizons and lets us do a Nightwing movie or a Batgirl movie, but what something might be, I don’t know,” explained Bruce. I asked him, if Arrow continues to be popular, will we see a Green Arrow animated movie? “Who knows? Maybe. Possibly. We’ll see.” was his response. That sounds hopeful to me, Arrow fans.
When asked if he was concerned bringing the politics of the comic to the film version of The Dark Knight Returns, Bruce said, “Fortunately for me, my takeaway from reading the original in terms of political mind view is that Frank Miller seems to hate everybody. You know? It’s not that he hates liberals or he hates conservatives.”
Bruce caught himself and said, “I shouldn’t have said that. Frank doesn’t hate everybody. I don’t think Frank hates anybody.”
