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For his past few cinematic adventures, Batman has been a creature of the night, a solitary force against crime and corruption in Gotham City. In the new DCU movie universe, that is going to change.
According to an announcement from DC Studios co-president James Gunn, Batman will be lonely no more. A new animated theatrical film, appropriately titled Dynamic Duo, will feature not one but two Robins: the original Dick Grayson and his first successor Jason Todd.
For years, Robin’s absence from recent Batman film entries has been a point of contention among fans. From Batman Begins onward, filmmakers have tended to present Batman as either grounded in reality or too dark and brooding to make space for a happy-go-lucky adolescent in bright red togs. In Batman v Superman, Zack Snyder even made a point to let the audience know that the Robin of the DCEU was dead, killed by Jared Leto’s Joker. And yet, Robin has been one of the most consistent parts of Batman lore, established even before Alfred and the Batcave.
Robin debuted in 1940’s Detective Comics #38, a creation for which Bob Kane takes credit, but more properly belongs to Jerry Robinson and Bill Finger. Kane wanted to give younger readers a surrogate character, and Robinson took the name and design from the Robin Hood stories he loved as a child. Finger built on the idea of Robin Hood’s merry men to make Batman’s sidekick a good-natured acrobat who becomes Bruce Wayne’s ward after the death of his own parents.
The plan worked. Robin helped boost Batman’s popularity and launched a wave of teen sidekicks. Captain America palled around with Bucky. Green Arrow fought alongside Speedy. Sandy the Golden Boy joined Sandman. So popular was the concept that DC started publishing stories about Superboy despite initially rejecting the idea before Robin’s arrival and, in 1964, gathered them into their own team, the Teen Titans.
As enduring as it the idea was, many still thought teen sidekicks were a bridge too far. Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham famously saw something unseemly in the close bond between Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson. Stan Lee hated the idea of sidekicks and thus killed Bucky off-panel when he resurrected Captain America in Avengers #4. And countless smart-alecky satirists have taken aim at the idea, from Rick Veitch’s The Brat Pack to Garth Ennis’s Team Titanic in The Boys.
Still, Batman has never been long without his Robin, at least in the comics. The movies have been another story. Sure, Douglas Croft and Johnny Duncan portrayed the character in 1940s serials, Burt Ward brought his small-screen version to theaters in 1966’s Batman, and Chris O’Donnell tried to do a bad boy rebel sidekick in Joel Schumacher’s movies from the 1990s, but more recent takes have separated the Dynamic Duo. The insecure, over-eager Robin of Teen Titans, Teen Titans Go, and Teen Titans Go to the Movies resents Batman’s shadow, as do the edgier Robins on the series Titans. The Dark Knight Rises famously juked around the concept altogether by making Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s cop John Robin Blake.
It’s not too hard to see the reluctance to give a proper Robin to Batmen played by Christian Bale and Robert Pattinson, or a living Robin to Ben Affleck‘s Snyderverse version. Heavy line work from Frank Miller and caricatures by Tim Sale can convincingly put a smiling teen next to a brooding Batman, but few directors can pull off the same feat in live action. Heck, even Tom Hardy’s Bane and Colin Farrell‘s Penguin looked a little odd in their respective films.
The announcement for Dynamic Duo seems to have found a surprising solution. The movie will be directed by Arthur Mintz who, along with his wife Theresa Andersson, operate Swaybox Animation. “Swaybox uses a technology known as “Momo animation,” which is a cross between CGI animation, practical elements of stop-motion, and live-action real-time performance,” Deadline reports. “The result is long-form storytelling billed as visually breathtaking, dynamically expressive and more human.”
Instead of running from the goofier aspects of Robin, Dynamic Duo seems to be embracing them, using them to tell a very different type of Batman story from those we’ve seen so far. James Gunn and Peter Safran have been very upfront about the fact that everything from their DC Studios tenure will be interconnected, even across media. So even if Batman isn’t a major part of Dynamic Duo, it will relate to the new era’s first proper Batman picture, The Brave and the Bold, directed by Andy Muschietti and featuring the Damien Wayne Robin.
Through animation and puppetry, Dynamic Duo will finally give Batman his partner, ignoring the weirdness and embracing one of the most important team-ups in comics history.
DC Studios has not yet set a release date for Dynamic Duo.
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