When asked whether Clayface‘s Gotham would be how the city would appear in the DCU going forward—like, say, in that Brave And The Bold Batman movie that seems further away now than it did when it was announced in 2023—Safran cited the city’s eclectic artistic variations in the comics. “What we’ve always said is that there’s a consistency to the look, but the next filmmaker that tackles Gotham, they [can] use it as a starting point; they can all feel different,” Safran said. “We want each film to have its own reflection of the vision of the filmmaker. Listen, Gotham is a grittier, dirtier place, for example, than Coast City, and I don’t think, suddenly, Gotham’s not going to become Paris, and so I think that that’s always going to be consistent.”
After assuring fans that, yes, Gotham City would remain a rank pit of human despair regardless of which film or TV show it appeared in, the conversation pivoted to the future of DC Studios amid tumultuous paradigm shifts within the company that now owns it. With Clayface hitting theaters next week, Man Of Tomorrow in post-production, and The Batman: Part II and The People V. Gorilla Grodd HBO series in various states of filming, DC’s future live-action slate looks more present-minded than what Safran and Gunn initially proposed when DC Studios launched three years ago. While admitting there are “a couple” of projects “vying” to be DC’s next live-action project, Safran said no commitments have been made for either film or TV. “It’s a little bit TBD,” he said.
Beyond DC’s “robust” animation slate, with the Absolute Batman animated series still in the works (co-creator Scott Snyder is working on scripts), Safran attempted to distract from all this Batman talk by casually revealing the two leads in Tom King’s Mister Miracle animated series, with Josh Hutcherson playing Scott Free/Mister Miracle and Mackenzie Davis playing Big Barda. Yet Safran tacitly acknowledged that Batman’s DCU future remains ahead—outside of Matt Reeves’ The Batman: Part II, of course, which he confirmed will continue filming despite the production’s recent pause—even if the Dark Knight’s noted absence in the DCU proper continues apace.
“Listen,” he said, as everyone leaned in. “We know that we’ve got [The Batman: Part II] and [the animated film] Dynamic Duo in 2028. I couldn’t be more excited about the plans that we have over the next five years and, obviously, a lot of them, we’re just not able to talk about yet […] I think you’re never going to please everybody, but I have a feeling that people are going to be excited about what we have coming up. And, again, everybody’s aware of the issues we’re having right now [with The Batman: Part II], but what we’ve seen so far of the shoot, it looked absolutely fantastic, and Matt Reeves is a supremely talented filmmaker. Dynamic Duo is, for my money, as original today as Pixar was when they did Toy Story, so we’re really excited about that.”
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