[This interview contains major spoilers for Merry Little Batman.]
DC Studios’ Merry Little Batman sees Bruce Wayne in an unusual turn: donning his dad hat during the holidays.
The Warner Bros. Animation film follows the relationship of Bruce and his son, Damian, an 8-year-old desperate to be just like his crime-fighting father. The only problem — beyond him being a literal child — is that crime no longer exists in Gotham. Batman decided to clean up the streets for good to give Damian a shot at the safe, crime-free childhood Bruce didn’t have.
But when his overprotective father is called to save the day in Nova Scotia on Christmas Eve and becomes stranded in a trap laid by Mr. Freeze, Damian is left home alone with no one to help him as two criminals break in. The hapless burglars manage to make off with his newly gifted utility belt, leading Damian on a chase through Gotham’s wintry streets as he encounters the Rogues Gallery: Penguin, Bane, Poison Ivy, and none other than The Joker.
The film, which stars Luke Wilson as Bruce Wayne, Yonas Kibreab as Damian, and James Cromwell as Alfred, alongside David Hornsby (The Joker), Therese McLaughlin (Poison Ivy), Brian George (The Penguin), Chris Sullivan (Bane) and Dolph Adomian (Mr. Freeze), was initially set to debut on Max. But like a litany of other projects slated for the streamer, it was axed as part of a series of tax write-offs that downsized the company’s pandemic-fueled content library. Luckily, Merry Little Batman found a studio interested in bringing the Dark Knight’s fans a little Christmas cheer.
“When Warner Bros. was bought by Discovery, there were, obviously, a lot of changes and some course correction. The good news was, we had an animatic, and it was in very good shape. We were all very happy with it, and [WBD], from what I understand, did like the project, so they allowed us to continue producing it and making it with the idea that we find a new home for it,” recalls the film’s director Mike Roth. “We pitched it around, and Amazon got very excited and bought it, thankfully.”
The Warner Bros. animated film is also attached to a spin-off series, similarly canceled at Max and revived by Amazon, that will expand the world teased in Batman’s first real Christmas film, which is visually inspired by the art of Ron Searle. It’s a universe that doesn’t forget to pay homage to its previous iterations either, with Ka-Pow jokes and more easter eggs for just about “every iteration and generation” of Batman fans, says the director.
“That’s what the nipple suit is in the Batcave. That is 100 percent a nod to George Clooney and that whole suit,” Roth says, speaking to one of the movie’s easter eggs. “Damian’s like, well, that leaves nothing to the imagination, and I feel like everybody watching that movie for the first time had a similar thought.”
Merry Little Batman is a film chock-full of inspirations and homages — from Home Alone to Shel Silverstein — and even features fun musical touches like “All I Really Want For Christmas,” from Lil Jon and featuring the Kool-Aid Man (yes, the actual drink mascot). Roth notes that music choice, in particular — lyrics that “speak exactly to Damian’s POV” alongside “a bassy, booming beat” that drives audiences through a sequence where Damian is “beginning to get all he really wants for Christmas”— had him feeling like the song “was written for this moment.”
“We knew we wanted a needle-drop Christmas song here,” Roth tells The Hollywood Reporter about the music supervision choice. “We also wanted a song that quite frankly ‘kicked-butt,’ to really put an exclamation point on the excitement Damian is experiencing. And for the audience we wanted it to have an MTV music video vibe.”
Roth spoke to THR about all of this and more, including scraped movie ideas, how the TV show was born, and whether Batman Returns is a Christmas movie following the release of Merry Little Batman.
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The film holds a sort of unique place in the Batman canon, which has been around as long as a whole person’s — or multiple people’s — lifetime. Can you talk about your approach to taking him into dad and Christmas territory?
There’s 90 years of history with Batman, so he’s had lots of different iterations, but like you said, it’s a lifetime, basically, since we’ve ever seen this type of Batman. Usually, he’s a brooding, stoic presence. For us, we got an opportunity to explore the dad side of Bruce. He’s still Bruce because he still has that laser focus, but he’s vanquished all the crime in Gotham, so … now he’s taken all of his laser focus, and he’s put into being a dad.
When exploring that space, we took some of our own daddisms — who we are as dads — and we put that into him, while still being true to his character. He’s still stoic, but he has this loving, touching side, and because he’s so laser-focused on raising his son, he no longer needs a debonair style. He’s grown a beard. He’s got a flannel on. He’s got his dad sneakers. He’s in full dad mode, or as we affectionately call him, a “bat-copter dad” — a helicopter dad. (Laughs.)
When it was originally imagined, the idea was, let’s have a Christmas story with Batman. It had some homages to Home Alone and still has some of that DNA in there, though, originally, it was even more Home Alone-ish. But what better way to tell a Christmas story than through the eyes of a child? Very early on, there was an idea — it didn’t last long — about, what if Batman was a kid? But I think people love Batman, and they want to see the Batman they want to see.
It seemed natural then to go this [movie’s] route because Batman does have a child, Damian. He’s an interesting character, and I feel like people love him, or they hate him. (Laughs.) But because he’s 13, he’s a little bit petulant and at that point where he talks back, and that wasn’t quite the angle that we needed. So we dialed the clock back on him and we made him eight.
To be honest, when we were first exploring this branch of Batman, we didn’t jump 100 percent into dad-mode. The story kind of took it there, and I think it’s for a whole bunch of reasons. We’ve never seen this type of Batman before, but the story opened up a door for us to see a side that we normally wouldn’t see.
You mentioned not going with Bruce as a kid, but you’re still exploring Batman tropes with Damian. They’re just almost inverted, like the bat-signal, which inspires fear instead of hope because crime has been wiped out. Why and how did you and the writers, Morgan Evans and Jase Ricci, want to play with those specific tropes even though you weren’t telling a Bruce story?
Damian gets his belt for Christmas and all that is, is the macguffin. What Damian wants more than anything is to be Batman like his dad, but there are two things stopping him. One, there’s no crime left in Gotham, and two, Bruce is overprotective. So the door opens up for Damian when Bruce gets tricked into going to Nova Scotia, and then, lo and behold, these two criminals break in and crime is back. So what we’re seeing is Damian beginning and completing this journey of becoming Batman.
All those tropes, as much as we possibly could, we strategically placed them so that we could see this growth. He first gets in the Batmobile, he can’t really use it. (Laughs.) Ok, the Batpod is a piece of machinery he can handle. He’s starting to become his dad now. He’s having fun, and he’s still very childlike — still focused on getting the belt, but as it’s happening, he’s growing into this superhero. Now he’s got big Rogues Gallery villains. These aren’t B-villains. This is the real deal. We’ve got real stakes, he could die. He’s up against some of the worst, and it just keeps escalating.
That zoo scene says so much about those tropes because [Damian] sees Bruce’s angle for the first time. He’s starting to understand why his dad is who he is, which is really the growth of a child moving towards maturity. Then in the very, very end, when he goes to fight the Joker and everybody, he finally learns his lesson. He says, “I’m going to have to sacrifice this thing I love. That’s what dad has been telling me all along, and now I get it. I’m going to sacrifice this belt, and I’m going to do everything I can to defeat these villains and save Christmas.”
And at the very end, of course, which is one of my favorite parts, Bruce Wayne doesn’t even see it at first. (Laughs.)
Batman has been both serious and comedic onscreen, with some of the lighter, more self-aware moments as a crime-fighting superhero in the ’60s series and ’90s live-action films. Your movie does this, too. How did you think about being funny without making fun of being a vigilante dressed as a bat or undercutting the dangerous moments for Damian?
I think a lot of that stuff happened organically while putting the story together because we’re also fans of Batman. I don’t want to date myself too much, but I’m almost 50, so I grew up with the ’66 Batman when it was very fun and campy. But even in that ’66 Batman, he’s still a stoic, stern gentleman type. You don’t really see behind the mask, even when he’s not wearing a mask. That was a fun space to explore for us. You can see jokes littered throughout the whole project that are nods to all the different Batmans. Some of that was for ourselves, some of that we placed for the fans.
I always said, with the humor in our project … we could never go full Mel Brooks. I’m not knocking Mel Brooks. He’s my favorite. But for us, we wanted to create this world that had real pathos for Damian, so we needed a universe where an anvil hits you over the head and it will kill you. The comedy had to come from a place where it couldn’t get so zany that it was Tex Avery because then you would never believe that this little kid is actually in danger. It’s a restraint that we put on ourselves on purpose. It gave us the emotion that we needed.
Another thing with this property that was a bit of a balance is wanting that co-viewership. We didn’t want to make something that’s just for kids or just for adults. We wanted grandparents to enjoy it, too. What’s their Batman? That’s part of why in the sound design, there are a lot of analog-type sounds. The phone for example has more tactile buttons. The rewind button, it’s clearly a VHS tape. The fight sequences with Mr. Freeze, that’s very much for the middle-aged generation of Batman fans, and then a bunch of stuff in there for the kids as well.
You both follow and buck the unspoken rules of kids storytelling. Damian goes on some dangerous adventures without an adult, but then you give him an AI “Bat-Dad” when he thinks Bruce might have died. It’s an interesting workaround to letting a young child loose in Gotham and a twist on Bruce’s story. Damian now lives in a world where, unlike Bruce, he can grow up with his dad even if he’s gone. But what did you want to achieve including an AI Bat-Dad?
He’s a child going on this journey becoming an adult. His real wish fulfillment is to be his dad at some point, so having Bat-Dad come along with him, it gave us a couple of devices. One, it can be there as a guiding light, but I think the more subtle part of it is, it is his dad, but it’s not his dad. It’s almost like a carrot. He’s almost got his dad and then it dies and then he does get his real dad in the end.
For us, it’s always been a story about the relationship of a father and a son, so having Bat-Dad on that journey with Damian changes that chemistry a little bit. It’s teasing a father presence in there, plus Bat-Dad’s super funny. And when Bat-Dad dies, it gets me every time. That zoo scene where he really makes this connection with his dad and you see that this dad respects him — but it’s not his dad. It’s a computerized version of his dad. It’s almost there, but it’s not.
As a filmmaker, what I wanted was to keep that tension alive. Damian wants his dad, but he can’t have his dad. When his dad shows up at the end of the movie, and he sweeps through the candy factory, I hope that the audience gets that experience of, “Oh, thank goodness. They are finally together.” (Laughs.) And Bat-Dad helps that journey.
The Ron Searle-inspired art was lovely, and the right kind of menacing when it needed to be with the Bat villains. They’ve also got this Shel Silverstein, caricature-like look to them — with that added visual movement. It feels different than where a lot of the experimentation in animation style is these days post-Spiderverse. How did you approach delivering a classic art look in our modern, CG-dominated animation world?
That’s very observant. Shel Silverstein also was an influence for us. Even at times Gary Larson and Far Side. There’s like a little bit of Calvin and Hobbes in there as well. Nothing comes from no place, you know what I mean? And it’s not like we just want to do something different. The driving force behind this project has always been, it’s a Christmas movie, so how do we tell that? What’s the visual storytelling that also paints this Christmas picture? Some of that is color. Some of that’s putting in Christmas trees and lights and decorations.
But we also wanted something that felt like a picture book. Almost like something you read Christmas Eve to your kids that has an illustrative feel to it and maybe rings a little bit of Charles Dickens. Ron Searle is such an interesting choice to me because the drawings themselves are very sketchy. There’s a visceral-ness to it, and a crudeness, which to me represents Gotham. At the same time, they’re also very funny. That kind of bookends it. It balances the seesaw of the two things that we need this property to be.
With Batman, there is an expectation, especially now, to have a grittiness, too. It’s so baked into him. You want to feel that a little bit. So then it was just a matter of taking Ron Searle’s sketchiness and applying it to a production pipeline for animation. Those drawings are hard to replicate because they’re so loose. We needed some rules and parameters. I don’t know if 50 years ago, this style would necessarily work. With computer technology, we’re able to get that line and color boil that would be so insanely expensive to do 50 years ago.
It’s just one of these things, right time at the right place. The technology’s there and the idea is there. Everything came together, but it was a very complicated style. Even early on, there’s that little voice in the back of your head that’s going it’s too complicated to animate. But luckily we found a production solution to it, and we were able to put it together. My art director, who’s amazing, Guillaume Fesquet, and then assistant art director, Daby Zainab Faidhi, who is also super amazing, very much found that style.
The other thing was I’ve always wanted to do a monochromatic color style. Those types of color choices are so powerful — like a single color dominating a scene. Blue has a very visceral, emotional response. The Joker’s office is green and it feels disturbing and unnerving. Throughout the whole film, we very meticulously went through and chose colors that would sell the emotion that we wanted.
Vox recently published a piece arguing that Batman Returns is a Christmas rom-com. Since you’re technically the first certifiable Batman Christmas movie, what’s your take on that film as a Christmas movie?
That’s a tricky one. There are Christmas themes in that and it’s just fun. It’s interesting to see this dark, brooding world with the backdrop of Christmas. Because Christmas is so vulnerable and Gotham is so much the opposite, it automatically elevates the stakes. I think that’s probably the reason why it works so well. Christmas in Metropolis feels a lot different than Christmas in Gotham. So Batman Returns in that sense, it’s great. It’s a great setting.
But with our movie, what we want to do is tell a true Christmas story. Not Christmas is the backdrop but that Christmas is part of the DNA. Our whole story revolves around Damian chasing down a Christmas gift that was stolen from him. So in my opinion, our project is more of a Christmas movie. It’s the Christmas season story that hopefully, in my opinion, can become perennial, that people come back to and watch every Christmas. That’s not to take anything away from Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher — all of those. They’re all just so fun.
Merry Little Batman is currently streaming on Prime Video.
December 26, 2023 at 12:30AM
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How ‘Home Alone,’ Lil Jon, and ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ Helped ‘Merry Little Batman’ Deliver the DC Hero’s First Christmas Movie - Hollywood Reporter
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