We reported awhile back about Bruce Timm working on Justice League: Gods and Monsters, a new DC animated film. Reportedly not based on the Dan Jolley book of the same name, the details of Gods & Monsters are scarce; we know it’s an original film with Bruce Timm producing alongsideal an Burnett, Timm’s Batman: The Animated Series co-producer and writer — so, you know, hype levels: maximum and all that.
However, yesterday brought the news that this new film is going to get a little bit bigger as the online channel Machinima is going to be making a companion series called Justice League: Gods and Monsters Chronicles, which will debut online sometime next spring with three episodes. Little is known about what the film or series is directly about, but the Variety article does note that it will feature “much darker versions of the superheroes that people know.” Given how dark the New 52 is, with “Forever Evil” having just wrapped fairly recently, I’m curious to see how much darker we can get.
The first new Justice League “show” in some time, it’s interesting to see the first digital animated series debuting. While television and film are a battleground of comic-related TV shows and films, there aren’t a lot of digital-first or digital-only series to really take a look at. Sure, places like Hulu and Netflix have debuted original animated content (some even involving superheroes), but so far we’ve not had anything from either DC or Marvel in this arena — and it’s one of those things that, in retrospect, seems sort of obvious. Content that can be streamed for older and younger audiences with the click of a button? It’s a lot easier than trying to remember what time in the morning on Saturday a show airs, that’s for certain!
However, as noted the details on both Gods & Monsters and Chronicles are extremely scarce. Chronicles will be the prelude to the film, but it is not known what role Timm or Burnett will have in the series directly, if at all.
