Early this year, Warner Bros. planted its flag on the calendar, setting release dates for a few of its upcoming DC films, including Matt Reeves’ The Batman, James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad soft reboot and the newly-announced animated movie DC Super Pets. The latter of those films was set for release on May 21, 2021 but has now been pushed all the way back into the following year.
Warner Bros. has pushed its DC Super Pets movie back an entire year and the movie about the crime-fighting pets of DC’s biggest superheroes will now release on May 22, 2022 according to Deadline. No specific reason has been given as of yet to why DC Super Pets has been pushed back so far.
Earlier this week, on the heels of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum’s successful box office debut, John Wick: Chapter 4 was announced and slated for release on May 21, 2021. That would have had it opening the same weekend as DC Super Pets, although I doubt that was the reason for the move. There may be some small overlap, but in general an animated kids movie and an R-rated action film aren’t competing for the same audience.
DC Super Pets now lands in a 2022 calendar that is largely populated by untitled films from the various studios and franchises. The dates have been claimed, but we don’t know what will be coming out on them as of yet. But we can now look forward, way forward, to seeing something quite different from DC in the form of DC Super Pets in three years time.
It's worth clarifying that DC Super Pets, from directors Jared Stern and Sam Levine, is not based on the Capstone Publishing line of the same name, though there could be some similarities. That imprint followed the crime-fighting adventures of the pets of DC characters like Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. Among the furry heroes were Superman’s Krypto the Super-Dog, Batman’s Ace the Bat-Hound, Wonder Woman’s kangaroo Jumpa, Aquaman’s seahorse Storm and the space squirrel and Green Lantern B’dg.
From 2012-2013, a series of animated shorts based on the characters aired on Cartoon Network’s DC Nation block. It will be interesting to see how this DC Super Pets movie compares to the previous comics and animated shorts, but feel free to check out a clip of DC Super Pets from Cartoon Network below to see what the previous onscreen incarnation was like.
While we all love cohesive cinematic universes like the MCU, it is exciting that something as obscure and silly and fun as DC Super Pets is going to eventually make its way to the big screen. Last year’s big screen DC animated film, Teen Titans Go! To The Movies only made $52 million. But its budget was only $10 million and it gave audiences, especially the younger ones, something different from the standard superhero blockbuster.
Hopefully DC Super Pets can continue that trend and like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, give us some variety in our cinematic superhero adventures.
DC Super Pets may be delayed until 2022, but 2021 still has two huge DC movies with The Batman on June 25 and The Suicide Squad on August 6. That’s all a long way off though so check out our 2019 Release Schedule for movies you can see this year.
