‘Batman: Caped Crusader’ Gets Two Season Prime Video Commission
In December, Warner Bros. Television Group chairman Channing Dungey said that her company was finalizing a deal with Amazon that would see some DC-branded content head to Prime Video for distribution. Now, it’s confirmed that Bruce Timm, Matt Reeves, and J.J. Abrams’ animated series Batman: Caped Crusader has received a two-season order from the platform.
Caped Crusader was first ordered to series for HBO Max in May of 2021. In August of 2022, HBO Max announced it wasn’t moving forward with several of its animated commissions, Caped Crusader among them. Other dropped titles included a Gumball movie, Bye Bye Bunny: A Looney Tunes Musical, Merry Little Batman, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, and Did I Do That to the Holidays: A Steve Urkel Story.
At the time, there were reports that six projects had been axed by WBD, but that was never the case. As we reported, although the titles were no longer moving forward at HBO Max, WBD hadn’t outright canceled any of them. We later confirmed that the company was still shopping Bye Bye Bunny to other distributors and reworking the film as a full-fledged musical.
The fate of five of those titles is still in the air, but a two-season order for Caped Crusader is welcome news after a year that saw so many high-profile projects canceled, and titles removed from platforms.
Batman: Caped Crusader is produced by Warner Bros. Animation, Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions, and Reeves’ 6th & Idaho. The show is a throwback to the iconic 1992-1995 Batman: The Animated Series, co-created by Timm.
The show’s logline reads: “Utilizing state-of-the-art animation techniques, this powerful creative partnership will once again reinvent Batman and his iconic rogue’s gallery with sophisticated storytelling, nuanced characters, and intense action sequences all set in a visually striking world.”
Caped Crusader may not be the lone animated DC title on Prime Video for long. One of the first productions announced by new DC Studios bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran after they took the reins late last year was Creature Commandos, a seven-episode animated series penned by Gunn. They didn’t indicate how that series would be distributed, but Prime Video seems a likely destination if the show doesn’t go to HBO Max.
According to Safran, “We have the ability to sell outside of HBO Max if that makes sense. So we’ll figure out if there are certain shows coming up that would be better served elsewhere, or [if] there’s not real estate on HBO Max for us. But we like the idea of having shows on Amazon and Hulu and Netflix. It just broadens the DC audience.”
Given both Dungey and Safran’s comments, it seems likely there could be plenty more DC animated content headed to Prime Video soon.
