Throughout the years, a lot of stars have portrayed the role of The Dark Knight, aka Batman, in multiple media franchises. However, we have mostly witnessed the character of Bruce Wayne as the Caped Crusader in live-action roles and not many other versions of Batman have made it to the big screen.
In Batman Beyond, we saw a different version of Batman in Terry McGinnis for the first time and even then, Bruce Wayne was still a major character in the series.
Bruce Timm opens up about the problems they faced while making Batman Beyond
Batman is one of the most popular superheroes of DC Comics and will certainly go down in history as one of the greatest superheroes of all time. Multiple series and movies, both animated and live-action of the character have been developed over the years and a lot of actors have portrayed the role of Bruce Wayne.
However, after the success of series like Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures back in the 90s, DCAU decided to explore other versions of Batman. That was when Bruce Timm decided to make Batman Beyond which revolved around the story of Terry McGinnis’ version of Batman.
Batman Beyond revolves around the story of McGinnis, a teenage boy who is being trained by Bruce Wayne aka Batman himself to become his successor and watch over Gotham City as The Caped Crusader has become too old.
Although the executives of the show were sure about what they wanted, they still faced a lot of trouble with the writers as Bruce Timm, the creator of Batman Beyond once revealed in an interview with IGN. Timm explained how writers kept offering him stories that revolved around Bruce Wayne and he wanted the focus on Terry McGinnis, not a 70-year-old Bruce Wayne. He said,
“Literally all the pitches were about Bruce Wayne. And, I was like, ‘I love old man Bruce Wayne.’ I think he’s fascinating and fun because he’s ancient, and he’s cranky, and he’s more of a bastard than he ever was, but he’s not the star of our show…
All of our freelance writers, nobody understood it, nobody could get it, so we literally had to break like all of the stories in-house.”
Bruce Timm and James Tucker continued to face this problem with writers until Stan Berkowitz came along.
James Tucker explains that Batman Beyond was not made to explore the story of Bruce Wayne
The creator and director of Batman Beyond, Bruce Timm and James Tucker respectively faced a lot of trouble explaining to the writers how they wanted to change the focus of the franchise from Bruce Wayne’s Batman to Terry McGinnis.
Timm and Tucker even tried to hire freelance writers but even they did not turn out to be of much help. Stan Berkowitz was later appointed as the lead writer for the show as he clearly understood that Bruce Wayne was no more than just an important side character in Batman Beyond. James Tucker once opened up about the same in an interview with IGN, and said,
“The bedrock of the show was Terry McGinnis, it wasn’t Bruce Wayne…If you look at the heart of that show, it’s Terry McGinnis, Bruce Wayne is kind of along for the ride.”
Batman Beyond was first released in 1999 and quickly gained massive critical acclaim. Although the fans initially doubted if the story would be any good if the focus was shifted from Bruce Wayne to Terry McGinnis, they were proven wrong eventually.
All episodes of Batman Beyond are currently streaming on HBO Max.
