The painful irony of DC Comics’ stumbles at the box office is that Warner Bros., the entity which has been making the film and TV adaptations of DC’s comic properties for decades, already had this stuff in the bag. They invented the modern superhero movie with 1978’s Superman, then utterly conquered the nation’s imagination a decade later with 1989’s Batman, which was so successful that Hollywood’s been chasing it ever since. In the wake of Batman’s success, WB’s animation division gave birth to the cartoon to end all cartoons, Batman: The Animated Series, which in turn brought us the most popular new character the mythos has spawned in decades.
If you’re disappointed with the movies based on DC characters that have hit theaters in recent years, there have still been no shortage of options for watching Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and all your other favorite costumed heroes punch ninjas, get cloned and reboot the whole universe when the Flash runs really fast. Warner Bros. Animation has been producing direct-to-video and direct-to-streaming films about DC superheroes for years. You might not have known this, though, because they’ve largely been absent from the more popular streaming services. Most of the time, if you wanted to see a take on Red Son or Flashpoint, you’d need to either rent the movies or buy them outright.
With the emergence of HBO Max and its exclusive deal on all things Warner Bros., however, it’s now finally possible for people to view this extensive catalogue easily—and in one place. In particular, it’s finally possible to watch one of the more interesting portrayals of Batman in recent years, starting with the quartet of animated movies that began in 2014 with Son of Batman.
Every portrayal of Batman since the early ’90s has been under the shadow of Tim Burton’s 1989 movie and the Animated Series. If you’re going to adapt the Dark Knight to animation, there needs to be some interesting new take on the material. Son of Batman comes with a compelling take that hadn’t been explored in animated adaptations before: Focusing on Damian Wayne, who readers of the comics will recognize as Bruce Wayne’s son by his on-again, off-again love interest Talia, daughter of his longtime nemesis Ra’s al Ghul. It helps that, like so many latter-day Batman projects, these movies draw heavily on Animated Series alums: Alan Burnett produced and legendary voice director Andrea Romano worked on a couple of the films before her retirement in 2017.
Damian Wayne is a compelling character in his own right, and has served as the jumping-off point for some really great story arcs in the comics. The idea of the character has been around since at least 1987, when the graphic novel Batman: Son of the Demon introduced the concept of Bruce Wayne and Talia al Ghul having a child whose existence brings Batman and Ra’s al Ghul’s League of Assassins into conflict. In a different alternate timeline, the debonair Ibn al Xu’ffasch sits beside Talia in Mark Waid and Alex Ross’ celebrated Kingdom Come story—as the name translates literally to “Son of the Bat,” it’s not hard to guess at the character’s parentage. Grant Morrison brought the character into the mainline continuity of the comics and named him Damian Wayne in 2006, and since then the character has become another Robin.
Son of Batman kicks off with Damian (Stuart Allen) and his mother (Morena Baccarin) fleeing the destruction of the League of Assassins at the hands of Deathstroke. We learn (disturbingly) that Talia roofied Batman and spent a night with him, and that he’s been unaware that he’s a father for 10 years. (This is sexual assault.) Determining that her son is safer with his father than with her, she leaves Damian in his care, where the two quickly find themselves at odds.
Much of the series’ heart comes from Jason O’Mara’s stoic portrayal of Batman and Sean Maher’s Dick Grayson, who has already moved on to become Nightwing as the series begins. These stories leave the various intermediate Robins out of the picture, leaving us with a core family of Bruce, Dick, Damian and a bone-dry Alfred (the venerable and insanely prolific David McCallum). In Son of Batman, the Bat-family struggles to adapt to Damian, whom Allen portrays perfectly as an utterly un-self-conscious edgelord who can eviscerate foes with a katana but doesn’t know what to do when any kind of emotion overcomes him. The chief conflict of the film is believably the tension within Damian between his kill-absolutely-everything upbringing by Ra’s al Ghul and his grudging admiration for his father’s unshakeable belief in the sanctity of life.
