DC Fan Art Imagines Dylan O’Brien as Nightwing

A number of beloved DC Comics characters are beginning to make their way into the DC Extended Universe, with movies and HBO Max TV shows providing outlets for some interesting storytelling. One character that fans have been hoping to see on the big screen for quite a while is Dick Grayson / Nightwing, the older incarnation of the first Robin. A Nightwing solo movie has been in development since 2017, and while we have no idea who will ultimately play the hero, Teen Wolf and The Maze Runner star Dylan O’Brien has become a pretty popular suggestion amongst fans. A new piece from Instagram user @rahalarts imagines what O’Brien would look like in the Nightwing costume. You can check it out below.

The original Nightwing movie project has been tied to The LEGO Batman Movie‘s Chris McKay, who would direct the film with a script written by The Accountant‘s Bill Dubuque. In recent years McKay has indicated that there is no a “firm commitment” from Warner Bros. in making the movie, but he hopes his version of the project can happen.

“Nightwing is still a movie that I really want to do. I love the character of Dick Grayson as a young adult, becoming his own kind of superhero character,” McKay told Variety in 2021. “That was gonna be a father and son story and also a revenge movie, which I was really excited about because there’s a lot going on in that script. It was gonna be really primal and pared down and like a real red meat movie in the best way.”

“I hope that it’s something that we can still make. It has not been a priority these days; I’m hoping that it will become the priority soon,” McKay added. “That’d be my favorite thing to come out of all of this stuff.”

In a separate 2021 interview, McKay hinted at what the plot of his movie would have entailed, and how Batman might have factored into it.

“It was going to be a real, it was going to be a character study about this guy who grew up with sort of a bad dad,” McKay told The Bear Cave in 2021. “How that made him as a young adult try to fight off and go as far away from that world as humanly possible and get dragged back into it.”

“It was like you were picking up a Nightwing comic. You’re not guaranteed Batman was going to show up, but he could show up and other people could show up, but again you’re dealing with Nightwing and that’s what I like about it,” McKay said. “I like the idea of we don’t necessarily connect to certain things, we can just have it be a story that takes place in Blüdhaven or with Dick Grayson and his world. How he became Nightwing and why be became Nightwing there was a lot of stuff I liked about the approach.”