There is perhaps no storyline as canonical within the Batman catalog as Frank Miller‘s “Batman: Year One.” Hugely influential, as the title suggests, the story takes place shortly after the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents and tracks the young crimefighter’s first steps into becoming the masked superhero. As everyone knows by now, Darren Aronofsky briefly worked on bringing it to the big screen in the early aughts, but Warner Bros. shelved the idea at the time. Well, Miller’s tale is finally getting the movie treatment, though not in the form you might expect.
THR reports that Bryan Cranston, Ben McKenzie, Eliza Dushku, Katee Sackhoff and Alex Rocco have been lined up to voice an animated “Batman: Year One.” Lauren Montgomery (“Green Lantern: First Flight“) and Sam Liu (“The Batman“) are co-directing the film and fans rest easy, because they thankfully won’t be mucking around with the source material.
“The source material is surprisingly cinematic; it’s a pretty straight forward literal retelling,” executive producer Bruce Timm told the trade. “[David] Mazzucchelli‘s artwork is beautifully composed and we were able to refer to the comic for about 80 percent of the camera setups.”
So who will be voicing what? McKenzie will take on Bruce Wayne; Cranston will be James Gordon; Dushku is Catwoman; Sackhoff is Sarah Essen; and Rocco will be Carmine Falcone. But expectations will be tremendously high and Warner Bros. are putting their balls in a vice, with plans to premiere the film at this summer’s Comic-Con where they hope to get hearty approval from the geek faithful. After that, the PG-13 rated film will go straight to DVD this fall. Look above and below; those are some of the first stills from the production which is doing everything it can to knock it out the park. We’re pretty big fans of ‘Year One’ and we hope it will be done justice, and so far, we like what we’re seeing.
It doesn\’t have the same plot as Batman Begins. Batman Begins is not \”canonical\” in the comic\’s universe (not that Batman: Year One really is nowadays, despite what the article says, but it\’s probably closer to the current comics by far than the movie). The plot is completely different except for that it is supposed to show the beginning of Batman.
As for follow-ups, I\’d love to see animated versions of this book\’s sequels, The Long Halloween and Dark Victory. That would make an awesome animated trilogy.
They are rumoured to be following this up with The Dark Knight returns, which I would love to see.
I have watched a lot of these DC direct to DVD movies and they tend to be quite good, much better than any of the marvel animated stuff.
\’Justice League a new frontier\’ my favourite so far, though I am yet to see the much loved All star Superman.
Good work DC Animated / Warner.
reminds me of batman: the animated series. real excited for this.
I hope Ben McKenzie does more mainstream movies from now on. I thought that he had a promising career ahead of him when he was on The O.C.
Why did they bother making this? It has only been six years since Batman Begins came out.