Butch Lukic has been a fixture of the DC Animated Universe for decades and, in recent years, he's been tasked with overseeing the "Tomorrowverse" as an executive producer.
As a result, he's played a crucial role in all 10 of those direct-to-DVD features, starting with Superman: Man of Tomorrow and culminating with the recently released Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Three. There's a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the future of these movies, but we were fortunate enough to once again catch up with Butch to discuss the newly released threequel.
During our conversation, we heard from the veteran producer about the late Kevin Conroy's emotional farewell to Batman, scrapped plans to faithfully adapt the Crisis on Infinite Earths comic, his favourite cameos and characters, and what might eventually follow the Tomorrowverse.
Butch also confirmed that there were early plans to take us back to the Young Justice Universe and explains why it didn't happen.
You can reach our full interview on this potential final chapter of the DCAU below.
My first question is about Kevin Conroy. His scene went viral when the movie was released, but what did it mean to you for this to be his final performance as Batman?
Originally, we obviously knew we were going to get Kevin to do Batman for this scene. We didn't know at the time and I'm not sure if he knew because it was a year away from when he passed away. We were making jokes about it at the time saying, 'This is your last Batman animated, blah, blah, blah,' and he was laughing and making jokes about it too. In hindsight, it wasn't intended to be his final performance of the character but it turned out to be that way, sadly. The lines he did were only two lines really but he wanted to stick around and do the lines for the other Batman just for fun [Laughs]. He was having a good time with it, but we don't know if he was sick then or it happened later. Unfortunately, it wasn't intended to be his last performance but sadly now it is.
Was it always the plan for Mark Hamill to be involved as The Joker?
Once we told Hamill...we told him, 'Look, Kevin is doing it' and he always called us if Kevin was doing even just a couple of lines. He said, 'As long as Kevin is doing it, I'm all in,' and that was that. Even though he did state a couple years before that he'd retired from The Joker, he did want to do this one. Again, he didn't know anything as far as what Kevin's outcome was going to be. He was just doing it because it was a good end statement to Batman: The Animated Series for both of them.
You’ve done such a great job with the Tomorrowverse, but how do you look back at this era of storytelling now it’s reached its conclusion with the Crisis trilogy?
Well, originally, I wanted to do more than 10 movies which this ultimately was. I was hoping to keep things going and stretch things out so we could add more buildup for certain characters. It was decided that we'd get 10 movies and we'd need to get as much in there as we possible could so they'd be cohesive. They gave us a 5-year plan which is what we did. We did it all in 5 years. 10 movies and the shorts. Originally, the previous universe was open-ended after 14, 15 years, but this time around, they wanted a definite start and a stop. And that's what we produced.
Were you satisfied with how the Crisis story came together? It’s a massive comic book story but you get to tell it across three movies.
I think so. As time goes by, I think I’ll enjoy it better when I see it again later. It’s when you’re knee-deep in the middle of it and all the problems we had to fix and face and literally over 1000 FX shots and things like that which have to be produced after the fact…it’s a lot of hard work, plus the amount of characters involved. You’re trying to make the choice of what you can actually show with the budget and what you have to cheat on. It’s a lot of hard work that way, but satisfied? Yeah, I’m satisfied because of my experience of doing this for 30+ years. Ultimately, I’d have loved to have a much larger budget and a little bit more time. You always think you can do a better job.
Something I think you’ve always done a great job with is the characters. So, I’m curious, was there an arc or cameo which stood out to you as a favourite after working on these movies?
Honestly, it would have probably been Sgt. Rock and some of the big DC war characters. The only ones we did get in there were The Losers. I’d have preferred if we’d had more of them from the books. There are a few others, I’m sure, but I can’t think of them right now.
I know the Tomorrowverse is ending sooner than you might like and with DC Studios forging ahead with its own plans, do you view this as a jumping-off point or are you hoping they might live on as Elseworlds stories?
You never know. Right now, I couldn't say anything as far as what they want to do beyond these. Obviously, the James Gunn DC Universe is what's important right now; as far as anything to jump off of this stuff, I think it's very secondary so it's going to be more aligned to whatever the DCU is as James Gunn works it out.
We talked about cameos, but was there anyone you couldn’t include here, whether it’s because of the animation style or the fact they were just off-limits to you for whatever reason?
We picked what we needed and what we wanted. We did have a couple of other DC Universe characters we were going to have in peril like Young Justice. Eventually, there was just no way. I had to pare it down to how many we need; it was down to time-wise but also, if you show too many of these DC Universes, it becomes a drag instead of being interesting to the plot and story. We did break it down to four that worked. If we went any further, it might be too far or too much. We’d rather fans leave wanting more than give them too much.
You put a new spin on the comics here, something that’s been the case throughout the Tomorrowverse. Why do you think that’s been important to the success of this franchise?
I’ll tell you what, originally when we were planning on doing Crisis, we absolutely were thinking of being true to the original book. As we went on with the Tomororwverse, we had to rethink that idea and try to figure out what characters we would incorporate into Crisis that replace others in the original comic. Now you’ve seen the film, you can see how we replaced Pariah with Harbinger. Intentionally, our original writer wanted to do the book verbatim but as we went from film to film, we knew that wasn’t going to be possible. We did retain a lot of important elements to the Crisis story that George Perez and Marv Wolfman did.
Finally, this movie ends with a tease for Wonder Woman’s future. Were there plans to expand on that or did you have a Diana Prince story you hoped to tell in the Tomorrowverse?
Yeah, originally I would have liked to stretch into another two or three movies involving Wonder Woman that tracked her progress from the 1940s into the 50s and 60s. That would have been nice to see but we needed to make a big jump from when we last saw her into the modern Wonder Woman.
Justice League Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Three is now available on Digital, 4K UHD in limited edition SteelBook packaging, and Blu-ray.