Of the many film and TV projects that James Gunn and Peter Safran have mulled over since taking over Warner Bros. Discovery’s DC Studios back in 2022—some even not written or directed by Gunn himself!—none have had us feeling more bemused or curious than Dynamic Duo. Or, as we’ve come to think of it, pretty much exclusively, “the CGI puppet Robins movie.” Directed by Arthur Mintz, the animated film is being produced at Mintz’s Swaybox studio, which blends puppetry, computer animation, and stop-motion to produce some genuinely fascinating visuals. (You can see Swaybox’s reel, including some crazy stuff blending facial puppetry with CGI, over here.) Now, TheWrap is reporting some fresh news about the film, which will apparently focus on DC Comics characters Jason Todd and Dick Grayson, both of whom have carried the Robin moniker in the past: Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber have been tapped to rewrite the film.
A long-time screenwriting team, Neustadter and Weber are still best known for their work together on 2009’s 500 Days Of Summer. (They most recently served as co-showrunners on Prime Video’s Daisy Jones And The Six, and sometimes get tapped to work together to punch up existing scripts.) In this case, they’ll be working from a story template originally crafted by Coco writer Matthew Aldrich, who was the first announced writer on Dynamic Duo. The film—reportedly out of continuity with both the new DC Universe and Matt Reeves’ The Batman—will supposedly focus on the friendship between Jason and Dick as they both serve simultaneously as Robins. (In the comics, Grayson was the original Robin, replaced by Todd in the 1980s. Then Jason got beaten to death with a crowbar by a Joker. Then he came back to life and started murdering people. Comics!)
We’ll be honest: We’re mostly excited by the Neustadter/Weber news in so far as it means the movie is still an active concern for Gunn, Reeves—who’s producing—and the rest of the DC top brass, since it seems like an easy project to look track of amidst larger world-building concerns. That Swaybox animation style looks genuinely neat, and we’d really love to see how it applies to big budget superhero action, so we’ll be happy about any signs of life when it comes to this one. Dynamic Duo is one of a couple of oddball projects that have made it onto the DC slate in recent years, alongside films like next year’s Clayface from Mike Flanagan. Dynamic Duo is currently set for a June 2028 release.
