In an unfortunate update to what is arguably the last remaining source for at-least-somewhat-faithful depictions of the publisher’s materials, Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths executive producer Butch Lukic and Jim Krieg have admitted that in light of the relatively recent formation of DC Studios, they outright “don’t know” what the future holds for DC’s animated film endeavors.
RELATED: DC Is Relaunching Elseworlds As An Imprint In 2024 And You Probably Didn’t Notice
The duo of long-time DC Animated creatives – Lukic’s credits include storyboarding and directing stints on Batman Beyond, Justice League and Beware the Batman while Krieg has served as a writer on nearly every DC animated production in the last decade – revealed their uncertainty regarding DC Studios’ animated plans while speaking to ComicBookMovie.com‘s Josh Wilding in promotion of Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths – Part One‘s official release.
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Therein, the pair were at one point asked by their host, “I know that obviously with DC Studios there’s been a bit of uncertainty about what’s going to happen with these animated movies. Are you hoping they’re going to continue as Elseworld projects or do you not know yourselves at this point?”, to which Lukic admitted, “At this stage, we don’t know but anyone of these, even the Justice Society could definitely be, you know there could be other versions of that, as far as stories.”
“You know, again, it’s all dependent on where they want to go,” he further detailed to Wilding. “I mean, it all has to be Elseworlds. We can’t go into the James Gunn universe. But our whole goal, even before James Gunn was gonna come in and be in charge, we already knew we had a ten-movie structure and we’d be finished at this point. As far as beyond that, sequels, based on these films, again, that’s all up to DC and up to Warner Bros.”
And unfortunately for fans, it seems this ‘wait-and-see’ moment is but the latest in a series of uphill battles DC’s animated film arm has faced, as hopping off of his colleague’s anecdote, Krieg then recalled, “And as we’ve been doing these interviews butch, I had a flashback, and the Tuckerverse [a colloquial name given by fans to the Justice League: Flashpoint Paradox-to-Justice League Dark: Apokolips War era of films produced by Head of DC Animation Movies James Tucker] – I forget how many movies, it’s a tremendous amount of movies – and so Butch and I had this idea that we would have a long time to build up to Crisis, which was the pitch, and I remember you and I talking to [President of Warner Bros. Animation] Sam Register and being like, ‘Maybe we could have twenty films, and they end in Crisis!’ and I think he said, ‘How about three?'”
“So we built it out, we negotiated up, but yes,” he concluded. “That’s where we are.”
To this end, Lukic further detailed, “I originally just wanted to keep doing the build up slow, slow, slow, with Long Halloween and Man of Tomorrow, and I wanted to take as long as possible and do an open-ended amount of films.”
“Crisis wasn’t thought of then, but then once we gave them our pitch, they went ‘Nah, we want Crisis involved in this, and we want you to do it in ten movies’, which is why we had to fast track some of these stories and build it towards this,” he concluded of his thoughts on the topic. “They weren’t going to give us twenty movies.”
Notably, Lukic and Krieg’s confusion comes as little surprise given the very vague terms with which DC Studios itself has addressed the situation.
Asked if “the animated movies from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment will continue” during the January 2023 unveiling of his and fellow DC Studios co-head Peter Safran’s cinematic plans, James Gunn asserted “Some of that stuff will continue as Elseworlds, but a lot of other stuff we’re starting to bring into animation with (Warner Bros. Animation President) Sam Register so that we’ll have things that are connected with this.”
“I think there have been a lot of really marvelous DC cartoons,” he added, “so we’re going to keep moving forward with that.”
Combine this wishy-washy answer with Gunn’s noted history of flip-flopping regarding his DC and one has an instant recipe for ‘Who even knows what’s going on anymore’.
The first entry in Gunn and Safran’s new DCU, Creature Commandos, is currently on track to rise from the grave onto HBO Max sometime in late 2024.