If today’s news that Matt Reeves will be directing Warner Brothers’s The Batman wasn’t enough for you Batfans out there, the studio has more. The Hollywood Reporter is stating that Warners is also developing a movie based on the heroic exploits of Batman’s former sidekick Dick Grayson, aka Nightwing. Heading up the project is Chris McKay, who already has some experience with the Batman family of characters as the director of the currently in release The Lego Batman Movie.
Joining McKay on the project is Bill Dubuque, who wrote last year’s actioner The Accountant. That film starred Ben Affleck, who has been starring as Batman in Warners’s DC Comics Extended Universe franchise of films.
In the comics, Dick Grayson was Batman’s sidekick Robin until he reached young adulthood, when he adopted a new identity called Nightwing. From there, he had numerous solo adventures and led various iterations of both the Teen Titans and their mid-twenties incarnation the Titans. Along the way he became a fan favorite in his own right. Meanwhile, Batman took on a number of young proteges who adopted the Robin identity. In last year’s Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice we saw that in the DC Comics Extended Universe one variation of Robin had been killed by the Joker at one point. Director Zack Snyder kept mum as to which Robin was the ill-fated one, but it now looks as if we can take Dick Grayson’s name off the list of possible victims. (In the comics, Jason Todd was the Robin who was killed by the Joker in the late-1980s’ storyline “A Death In The Family.” Todd’s survival was rather infamously voted on by fans in a special phone poll.)
The studio has several DC Comics properties in development right now for the Extended Universe. Currently the studio has Wonder Woman starring Gal Gadot scheduled to hit theaters on June 2 and will be following that up with Justice League on November 17. Jason Moma will get a solo turn as Aquaman on October 5, 2018. The studio is also planning solo films for the superheroes The Flash, Cyborg and Shazam. There are also plans in the works for a sequel to Suicide Squad, possibly another solo Superman film and Gotham City Sirens which would feature Suicide Squad‘s Margot Robbie reprising her Harley Quinn character alongside a group of the comics publisher’s female villains.
