Timm Talks About “Batman: Under the Red Hood”

While many of us are no-doubt still drooling over the just released “Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths” (except those of us with Netflix who have to wait a month to rent it!), DC animation legend Bruce Timm is offering teases about the next offering in the direct-to-home theater line, “Batman: Under the Red Hood.”

“It’s really good,” Timm told Comic Book Resources. “That’s about all I can say about it at the moment. It really is. We actually have the footage coming back from overseas, literally as we speak. We have two acts out of four, and it looks really, really solid. It’s a really cool story. It’s pretty darn dark but at the same time, it’s fun and emotionally involving, so I think it’s going to be a really terrific movie.”

The upcoming feature, which has a preview on “Crisis,” will see Bruce Greenwood and Jensen Aickles lend their voices to Batman and the Red Hood.

“I’ve been a fan of [Bruce Greenwood’s] for years. We’ve been trying to work with him for years on different projects, but we could just never get the stars to align, and this time, again, any time you have to re-cast Batman, it’s like, ‘Crap. We have to get somebody who can conceivably be as good as Kevin Conroy.’ Bruce was somebody who jumped out at me, especially after I saw the ‘Star Trek’ movie this past summer. I went, ‘Wow. He has an awesome, awesome voice.'”

[Jensen Ackles is] somebody that I’ve been following for a long time and I think he’s a really good actor,” added Timm. “His voice had the right placement in that he sounded like a grown-up, but not too old, and he had the right kind of attitude. We knew he could be tough but with a sense of vulnerability, as well. So yeah, he’s a terrific actor.”

Timm also offered a few hints about the upcoming “Green Arrow” animated feature.

“We had a ‘Green Arrow’ long form script in development, which was written by a really talented writer called Tab Murphy,” Timm related to Newsarama. “He wrote a script that was basically the Green Arrow origin story. It was a really, really great script. We all enjoyed it. The home video people crunched the numbers and thought that Green Arrow probably wasn’t famous enough yet to support his own feature. So we kind of had to put it on the back burner. But we’re hoping at some point to be able to make the movie because it’s a really, really great script. He’s a character that a lot of us really like. And it gives us a chance to to outside the Batman/Superman mythos and do something a little bit different. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”

“Some of the upcoming DCU DTV’s that we’ve got coming up are really, really exciting properties,” added Timm. “Some of them are original stories and some of them are based on very familiar, famous story lines that, when they are announced, people are going to lose their minds. So we’ve got some really exciting stuff coming down the pike in the next year or two.”

“Crisis on Two Earths” is currently out on BluRay, DVD and digital download. (And again, not for rental until next month on Netflix thanks to the new deal with Warner Brothers….)