‘Nightwing’ Director Reveals Why Dick Grayson’s Robin Is So Important

Director Chris McKay already carved out a spot in the Batman universe with The LEGO Batman Movie, but he’ll be turning his attention to the Boy Wonder for DC’s extended movie universe.

Announced as the director of the upcoming Nightwing movie, McKay has been hard at work developing the project that’s set to feature the Dark Knight’s former sidekick. And he intends to respect the character’s history in the film.

“You always thought Robin was the dork and were like, ‘I don’t want to be like Robin. I don’t want to play with Robin. I wanna play Batman,’” said McKay. “But Robin was there as a window character for little kids like me to understand Batman’s world and see into Batman’s world. There’s no other character in comics that went through this real-time transition.”

McKay was speaking with Collider when he revealed he wanted to pay respect to the character’s history, indicating that Dick is not the child who dressed in bright colors and traipsed across rooftops with his mentor every night.

“Every other character lives in a rough version of the age that they’re in,” McKay said. “Very few characters actually grow up in the comics and become something else, and go from being a boy to being an adult, and have their own life and become their own thing.”

McKay is an admitted fan of the character, equating this project to a dream job.

“I’m a big comic book fan, and being able to do the story of Nightwing, to do a Dick Grayson story, which is a character that every single person in the world knows, but has never really had a lot of screentime,” McKay said. “They make a billion Spider-Man movies and a lot of Batman movies, and they’ve tried The Hulk.”

He spoke about the anticipation people have for seeing the character on the big screen, stretching all the way back to the original movies.

“When they were making the Tim Burton movies, they were always like, ‘Oh, maybe we’ll do Robin in this now. Maybe we’ll save Robin for Returns. Nope, we’ll save it for the next one.’ With Christopher Nolan, people were like, ‘Is he gonna do Robin?’ When they made Batman v Superman, they were talking about it. I’m a big fan of underdog stories, and he is one of the biggest underdog stories in comics. And he’s a character that I grew up with. I like the arc.”

Nightwing doesn’t currently have a release date on Warner Bros. calendar as of now.

The next film for DC Comics-based properties is Justice League, hitting theaters November 17.

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