While Batman has had plenty of success on the big screen, his partner Robin has only made a few cinematic appearances. Both Burt Ward and Chris O’Donnell played a teenage Dick Grayson in the 1960s and 1990s, respectively. Since Joseph Gordon-Levitt played an original character named Robin in 2012’s “The Dark Knight Rises,” a comic-inspired Robin hasn’t appeared in live-action on-screen in two decades. While Grayson remains the definitive Robin in the larger pop cultural landscape, his successors like Jason Todd, Tim Drake, and Damian Wayne have shockingly never appeared outside of animated adaptations.
Since Ben Affleck’s Batman seems to be older than his cinematic forbearers, a movie focusing on an adult Dick Grayson as Nightwing and the other Robins could help give Affleck’s Batman some context. There have already been some highly-publicized allusions to Jason Todd’s demise that could be expanded upon with a Robin-centric tale. As the 2015 crossover “Robin War” showed, Batman’s four most famous Robins have a compelling group dynamic and play off each other well. A Robins movie could also take another hint from that crossover and examine the public’s perception of Batman in the DC Universe.
