Batman: A Death in the Family Clip – Red Hood vs. Joker (Exclusive)

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has provided ComicBook.com with an exclusive clip from Batman: A Death in the Family, the upcoming DC Universe animated project that brings back much of the cast of the fan-favorite Batman: Under the Red Hood. While Bruce Greenwood plays Batman, Vincent Martella is Jason Todd, and John DiMaggio is The Joker, the movie is likely not a direct prequel to Under the Red Hood, since the shared continuity of that generation of DC Universe movies just concluded with Justice League Dark: Apokolips War. Also? A Death in the Family doesn’t have just one continuity to begin with.

In the comics, when writer Jim Starlin and artist Jim Aparo were set to kill the Jason Todd Robin in a story titled “A Death in the Family,” DC set up a pair of 900 numbers, where fans could pay for the opportunity to weigh in on whether The Joker would succeed in murdering Robin or not. The fans voted to kill Todd (although it seems there was quite a bit of ballot box-stuffing on both sides of the vote).

In the spirit of that idea, the Batman: A Death in the Family movie will also give fans some choices: it has been designed as an interactive movie with various different stories that can happen depending on choices made by the audience. You could — although Warner Bros. probably can’t, for legal reasons — compare it to a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.

You can see a clip from the movie, featuring a showdown between the Red Hood and The Joker, below.

“Knowing that so many people responded so well to Under the Red Hood, obviously we didn’t want to let anybody down with this movie,” star Jason Martella recently told ComicBook.com. “But what I think is cool is, we expanded on a lot of ideas and themes from that film and we really looked into these characters in a deeper way than we were able to in Under the Red Hood because we had a different focus this time. I think fans are going to like this movie; I think they’re going to like having the option to send Jason’s life in some different directions.”

The interactive features are available on the Blu-ray, which will be available for sale on Tuesday. If you buy a digital copy instead, you can still watch all of the scenes, but they will be in pre-assembled versions of the film, which is an extended short and has a variable length depending on choices he viewer makes.

Batman: Death in the Family will have a spotlight panel at New York Comic Con’s virtual event today, starting at 4:20 p.m. ET/1:20 p.m. PT.