It’s been a rough few years for DC on the big screen, but things are looking up. Warner Bros has put James Gunn and Peter Safran in charge of building a brand new DC Universe. It all starts with the release of Superman in July 2025, but that’s just the beginning. Among the many other new movies and shows in the works, we recently learned that DC is developing a live-action Teen Titans movie. We can only say this – it’s about time.
Why is DC overdue for a Teen Titans movie? Why is this such an important project for the larger DCU? And why should the movie take a page from the critically reviled Batman & Robin of all things? Let’s explore why this is exciting news for DC fans.
The Enduring Popularity of Teen Titans
A Teen Titans movie makes sense for one simple reason – the franchise is one of DC’s most enduringly popular properties. On the comics side of things, there was a time in the ‘80s when Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s New Teen Titans was one of the most popular books on the stands, outselling heavy-hitters like Batman, Superman and Justice League of America. In those days, New Teen Titans was rivaled only by Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men, which made the 1982 crossover comic The Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans a very big deal indeed.
More recently, the 2003 Teen Titans animated series played a huge role in expanding the franchise. Much like the Justice League cartoon before it, Teen Titans was responsible for introducing these characters to a wider audience and making them household names. For many fans, the animated series offers the definitive take on characters like Robin, Starfire and Raven and the iconic rivalry between the Titans and their nemesis Deathstroke.
Nor is it fair to ignore the 2013 spinoff Teen Titans Go! While it offers a much more comedic and irreverent take on the team, Teen Titans Go! has proven enduringly popular and has managed to stick around for a full decade. It even spawned a theatrical movie of its own in 2019’s Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, followed by several direct-to-video films.
The one thing these Teen Titans projects all have in common – even the comparatively silly Teen Titans Go! – is that they present the Titans less as a rigid superhero team and more as a dysfunctional family unit. That’s really the core of the team’s appeal and the reason the franchise once rivaled the X-Men in popularity.
The Justice League is a group of like-minded heroes fighting to defend the world from the biggest threats imaginable. The Teen Titans are different. They’re confused, hormonal teenagers still finding themselves and their place in the world. They’re heroes trying to emerge from the shadows of their adult mentors. The franchise is full of teen angst and personality clashes and other elements that you simply don’t see in stories focused on veteran, adult superheroes.
It’s telling that Gunn and Safran are focusing on a Teen Titans movie before announcing a Justice League project. But why shouldn’t they? Gunn himself found great success exploring an angsty, dysfunctional super-team in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Perhaps Teen Titans can be for the DCU what the Guardians trilogy was for the MCU. The audience is clearly there already, so why not tap into the latent demand for a Teen Titans movie?
The Titans Live-Action Series
It’s impossible to talk about a Teen Titans movie without acknowledging the franchise’s previous foray into live-action. The Titans series ran for four seasons on Max, starring Brenton Thwaites as Dick Grayson, Anna Diop as Starfire, Teagan Croft as Raven and Ryan Potter as Beast Boy.
Titans is by no means a perfect series. The series never really figured out how to balance its large ensemble cast until the fourth and final season. It’s also a surprisingly dark and adult-centric take on the franchise. The original Titans trailer raised more than a few eyebrows with its graphic violence and Thwaites’ Robin uttering the infamous line, “F*** Batman!”
Even so, Titans offers a solid blueprint for how to translate the franchise into live-action. It certainly captures the dysfunctional family dynamic of the classic comics and animated series. Dick and Starfire are cast as unlikely parents to Raven, Beast Boy and the rest of the team. The shadow of Batman looms large over the show’s various Robins. The same goes for Joshua Orpin’s Superboy, who routinely struggled to find his own identity separate from that of his two fathers, Superman and Lex Luthor.
The series also worked in many of the most important Teen Titans villains from the comics. Season 1 was built around Raven’s demonic father Trigon. Season 2 offered an excellent take on the rivalry between Dick and Esai Morales’ Deathstroke. Season 3 took a more Gotham-centric turn, while Season 4 tackled Brother Blood (Joseph Morgan) and the fanatical Church of Blood.
Imperfect though it may be, Titans proves these characters can work in live-action. The series exists as a strong test case, and it’s one that can’t be ignored as DC begins developing the first live-action Teen Titans movie.
Sidekicks in DC Movies
News of a Teen Titans movie is like a breath of fresh air for DC fans. Not only was this team completely MIA in the previous DC Extended Universe, DC has rarely made room for teen sidekicks at all.
Consider that the last live-action Batman movie that attempted to include the Dark Knight’s sidekicks was 1997’s Batman & Robin. Few would argue that Batman & Robin is a good DC movie, but it deserves credit for trying in the sidekick department. No subsequent Batman movies have done as much.
Christopher Nolan’s comparatively dark and grounded Dark Knight trilogy had little room for a Robin. It instead reimagined Dick Grayson as Joseph Gordon Levitt’s John “Robin” Blake, a disillusioned police officer who becomes Batman’s successor at the end of 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises. 2016’s Batman v Superman reveals that the DCEU’s Robin was murdered by the Joker. The character only appears in the form of a defaced memorial in the Batcave, one that helps to fuel the rage of Ben Affleck’s brooding Dark Knight. And as for Matt Reeves’ The Batman? It’s tough to imagine a traditional version of Robin fitting into such a bleak, gritty superhero universe.
The only other Teen Titan to receive any love in the DCEU was Ray Fisher’s Cyborg, who appeared in 2017’s Justice League and enjoyed an expanded role in Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Even there, the film follows the example of DC’s New 52 comics by depicting Vic Stone as a founding member of the Justice League rather than a Teen Titan.
Outside of 2023’s Blue Beetle, DC has shown little interest in exploring its teen heroes characters in live-action. Again, the very idea of a hero having a teen sidekick is out of place in many of these darker and more adult-oriented films. It’s a shame, given how much the DC Universe is built on the idea of legacy and one generation of heroes guiding the next.
This is an area where Gunn and Safran’s DCU can really distinguish itself. The very existence of a Teen Titans movie suggests that this is a cinematic universe where teen sidekicks won’t be out of place. Based on the cast of the Superman movie, we already know that the DCU is a fully formed universe where major heroes are already established.
There’s room for this new incarnation of Batman to have a whole family of Robins. Presumably, that fact will be explored in the upcoming Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which Gunn previously confirmed will focus on the introduction of Bruce Wayne’s son Damian. There’s an opportunity for heroes like Starfire, Raven and Beast Boy to shine on the big screen. These characters no longer need to be ignored or reimagined as full-fledged Justice League members.
Between Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow and Teen Titans, the new DCU is already off to a good start in this area. DC has missed plenty of opportunities by relegating its teen heroes to TV and animation. They finally seem ready to make up for lost time, and that’s just one more reason to be optimistic about their new cinematic universe.
For more on DC’s cinematic future, see what to expect from DC in 2024 and brush up on every DC movie and series in development.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
