James Tucker, WB Animation Supervising Producer, spoke earlier this year about establishing new contnuity across the slate of DC animated adaptations and with the release of Son of Batman, he's expounding on that idea further.
Previously, Tucker stated, "
We’re going to focus on the newer material, and basically setting up our own version of the New 52. We’re films, so the New 52 doesn’t really make sense for us, because we’re not doing 52 movies a year, or a month (laughs). Basically, we connected with the New 52 to do more contemporary stories, because the earlier line of DVD movies were classics. Some things adapt well, some things don’t. We had to do something to give ourselves more creative freedom. We’re using the New 52 world as a launching point where we can kind of tell our own stories, kind of like we did on Justice League Unlimited. Not necessarily what the comics were doing at that specific time, but it allowed us to do our own version of specific characters. So that’s what we’re doing with the New 52 world."
And in
a new interview with CBR, Tucker further discusses the idea of using the New 52 as a basis for establishing continuity across the animated films. "
The thing is we want continuity, but we don't want to be hamstrung by it. So if there's a story that happened pre-New 52 that we think is a strong story, we'll adapt it into our universe. So that it doesn't rule out things that have already been pre-New 52," said Tucker. He continued, "We have a lot of plans, I can say that. The world's wide open. We don't really have a lot of restrictions on that. I mean, I just wish we could do 10 a year because -- no, I don't, because that's a lot of work. But there are ideas we want to do and characters I want to tap into. It takes time to get to them. We only do two a year that are in continuity, so it takes a while to get around to everyone. So as long as each movie has something or somebody in it that no one's seen on DVD before, I think we'll be accomplishing our goals."
Currently, the plan is for WB Animation to release two films a year that are established within the newly created "New 52" continuity and one standalone project. This year, we have Justice League: War and Son of Batman in continuity and Batman: Assault on Arkham outside of continuity. Expect next year's crop of DC animated films to be announced at San Diego Comic-Con. Previously, Tucker has stated that he'd like to do a Woner Woman-centric Justice League film and to possibly tackle an adaptation of Mark Millar's Red Son.
Son of Batman was released on digital dowload and on-demand on April 22. It will be available for purchase on DVD and blu-ray on May 6th. Batman: Assault on Arkham will be released later this year.
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