DC Comics’ film slate has been a mystery for a handful of years. There were announced feature films, and then hope of a continuation of Zack Snyder’s interpretation of the source materials. Some of those proposed movies, like Blue Beetle, are now heading for HBO Max. Others were presumed dead, lost in the shuffle of Development Hell, never to be heard of again. It’s in that column that I had dragged Nightwing, a feature film once attached to The Lego Batman Movie director Chris McKay. But when he came on CinemaBlend’s official ReelBlend podcast, he confirmed that Nightwing is still on the table at Warner Bros. and DC, and he hopes to begin working on it soon.
Chris McKay told ReelBlend:
I hope it’s still a reality. I hope that we still get to make that movie. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not lost yet. It is obviously something that… they’ve had other priorities, they’ve had other challenges. They’d had things that they needed to do, and I think that they found their way. I think their recent successes, and the stuff that they are planning on doing now, I think it opens the door for us to still be able to do a Nightwing movie. Whether you call it ‘in an alternate universe’ or you pick in their multiverse version which universe it's part of, there are different ways into it. But Nightwing is a big, action-packed, emotional movie. It may not, budgetarily, be similar to what we do with The Tomorrow War. But from a scope and scale standpoint, as far as the kind of action and the kind of heart, that’s what Nightwing is going to be all about.
I’m not able to comment on The Tomorrow War just yet. It’s still under embargo. But I can tell you that the news that Chris McKay is still interested in directing a Nightwing movie, and that he thinks the recent moves made by Warner Bros. suggest that it’s actually more than possible, help me to believe that this film is back on the table. And after umpteen Batman adaptations, including another soft reboot coming from director Matt Reeves and his leading man Robert Pattinson, I think a detour into Bludhaven is exactly what the Bat Family needs.
One of the developments that Chris McKay might be referring to is the greenlighting of a Batgirl movie that Bad Boys for Life directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah are helming exclusively for HBO Max. Does this mean that a Nightwing movie also could be developed for HBO Max, where a Bat Family might potentially be being developed? Chris McKay could be aware of development plans that haven’t been made public yet. So when we asked if Nightwing was “dead,” he made sure that we knew it’s still very much on the table, in his mind.
Look for Chris McKay’s The Tomorrow War starring Chris Pratt when it lands on Amazon Prime starting on July 2.
