Robert Pattinson’s The Batman will bring a classic comics storyline to the big screen, but not before Jensen Ackles’ upcoming animated feature Batman: The Long Halloween tells it first. The Long Halloween, based on one of the most famous and critically-acclaimed Batman comic arcs ever, will be Ackles’ first outing as the voice of the Caped Crusader. Though it’s making a few changes, The Batman is adapting the same core story.
Following the events of Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, The Long Halloween sees Bruce Wayne through another early year of fighting crime in Gotham. The story mostly revolves around the Holiday Killer, a serial killer who commits murders around the city on various holidays. Batman, Jim Gordon, and district attorney Harvey Dent all team up to stop Holiday and Gotham’s escalating mob war – two storylines that eventually intersect. The comic was a major influence on Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, and it remains one of the most well-respected Batman comics in existence.
While not the exact same story, The Batman is taking major cues from the Long Halloween. Both are set during the second year of Bruce Wayne’s crime-fighting campaign, both involve strong partnerships between Gordon and Batman, and both revolve around a mysterious serial killer – Holiday in the comic, and the Riddler in the live-action movie. Catwoman and mobster Carmine Falcone, both of whom play a major role in the comic, are also set to appear in The Batman, played by Zoë Kravitz and John Turturro, respectively. In everything but name, The Batman looks like it will be a live-action version of The Long Halloween.
Before The Batman gets to tell that story, however, the animated film version of Batman: The Long Halloween will release. Produced in two parts, with part one releasing on June 22, the movie will be the latest in a long line of feature-length animated adaptations from DC, many of which have received high praise from critics and fans. Jensen Ackles is set to make his debut as Bruce Wayne in the film, and he sounds perfect in the trailer footage released so far, harnessing an impressive vocal resemblance to classic Batman voice actor Kevin Conroy.
The two films aren’t really in competition with one another, but it should still be interesting to see how each of them interprets the Long Halloween storyline differently. Ackles has already proven that the most important part of his performance – the voice itself – is spot-on, while Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne is much more of an unknown quantity. With luck, fans will get two different high-quality adaptations when Batman: The Long Halloween and The Batman release.
