By The CW’s Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover event is spanning beyond the established Arrowverse. Celebrated Batman voice actor Kevin Conroy will play Bruce Wayne for the mini-series this winter. This is the first time he’ll play the character in an on-camera/live-action capacity.
Conroy is best known for voicing The Caped Crusader since 1992, most notably in Batman: The Animated Series, Justice League Unlimited, and the Batman: Arkham video games. While others have voiced Batman during this time, Conroy is considered the definitive Batman voice artist, and many fans believe that he’s the best Batman actor of all time.
Since Conroy is 63 years old, there’s discussion about which older Bruce Wayne he’ll play. Will he be the Bruce Wayne in Batman Beyond, mentoring a futuristic version of The Dark Knight? The more likely role could be the Bruce Wayne seen in the Mark Waid/Alex Ross mini-series Kingdom Come. Paranoid and donning an exoskeleton, the Bruce Wayne of Kingdom Come monitors Gotham City using giant robots called Bat-Knights. This is speculation on my part since Brandon Routh, who is playing Superman in Crisis, officially revealed his casting at the San Diego Comic-Con while wearing a Kingdom Come Superman t-shirt.
It’s also been reported that the characters from the show Black Lightning will meet the rest of the Arrowverse for the first time during Crisis on Infinite Earths. The third season of Black Lightning starts in October, and will likely lead right into the CW event.
Crisis on Infinite Earths is an adaptation of the seminal 12-issue series by Marc Wolfman and George Perez. It will be interesting to see how the massive story is adapted to these CW shows and what new story beats will be added. Since shows like Legends of Tomorrow play around with time, space, and continuity, I wonder if this will be a mash-up of various DC Comics events dealing with time, alternate timelines, and reality-reshaping events.
I kind of hope there’s some DC One Million thrown in for kicks, and maybe even a bit of Multiversity.
I similarly wonder if this is a hint of additional meta-stunt-casting to come. If there are countless iterations of superheroes in the multiverse, will we possibly see Lynda Carter or Adrianne Palicki show up as Wonder Woman? Perhaps Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher make a brief cameo as Lois and Clark. Is there a Tom Welling/Smallville cameo in there? Perhaps the Doom Patrol or the Titans hop from streaming to television for a brief appearance; maybe Swamp Thing similarly gets to show up and feel useful.
It’s fascinating how robust DC’s television superheroes have been in recent years, a feat their cinematic counterparts haven’t been able to match. This is, in some ways, the DC Comics version of Avengers: Endgame, except longer and done at a fraction of the cost.
I’ve got a lot of catching up to do with CW superhero shows before Crisis. Let us know how you feel about Conroy’s casting in the comments.
Best onscreen Batman to play future Bruce Wayne in The CW’s next superhero crossover [AV Club]
