This summer, DC's line of animated DTV movies is gearing up for Batman: Assault on Arkham, an original movie set in the world of the Arkham video games that follows up Blackgate's introduction of the Suicide Squad by sending them on a mission to kill the Riddler in Arkham Asyulm before he can bring down Amanda Waller's carefully constructed team. Set two years before Arkham Origins, Assault is a prequel to that game, but also a direct sequel to the prequel games, making it a pre-sequel, or possibly a se-prequel, or maybe a demiquel, or... look, it fills in a gap in the timeline, okay?

What matters right now is that DC Entertainment has released a behind-the-scenes look at the movie, featuring producer James Tucker (recently of Batman: The Brave and the Bold) along with screenwriter Heath Corson, co-director Jay Oliva, and of course, voice director Andrea Romano, along with some pretty cool animatics.

The neatest thing that's revealed in the video is that Batman himself (voiced by longtime Batman voice actor Kevin Conroy) is only making sporadic appearances in the film, as his version of the movie is happening off screen while the focus is on the Suicide Squad themselves. It's a pretty cool gimmick that allows for shifting the attention onto the bad guys that Amanda Waller has roped into her latest suicide mission, while still allowing them to bill it as a Batman film and get that sweet, sweet Arkham audience money.

As for the Squad themselves, while the video uses a few illustrations from the more recent (and utterly dismal) New 52 version of the team, the actual inspiration seems to be drawing from the classic run by John Ostrander, Kim Yale and Luke McDonnell, particularly in the relationship between Deadshot and Captain Boomerang, who appears to have developed Rorschach's prison brawling skills at some point in the past 20 years.

To be honest, the more I see of this movie, the more I'm actually interested in it -- especially after that scene where Batman's stealth attacks are shown from the villiains' point of view rather than his.

 

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