DC Comics’ animation department is finally tackling one of the Dark Knight’s greatest adventures, The Long Halloween. The voice cast for the adaptation of the classic 1996 story by Joseph “Jeph” Loeb and Tim Sale has been announced, and there are a few surprises in there.
Revealed by the Hollywood Reporter, the most interesting bit is that Supernatural’s Jensen Ackles — who already voiced Red Hood in one of DC’s direct-to-video movies back in 2010 — has been given Batman’s cowl. Additionally, late Glee actor Naya Rivera is Catwoman, having finished recording her lines before her untimely passing last year. Additional voices include the Transformers movies’ Josh Duhamel as Harvey Dent, Bosch’s Titus Welliver as Carmine Falcone, David Dastmalchian (who was one of the Joker’s goons in The Dark Knight and will be Polka-Dot Man in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad) as Calendar Man, Troy Baker as the Joker, and more.
The Long Halloween is more or less an unofficial sequel to Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, as it takes place early in the Dark Knight’s career as a hero, and depicts the origin of Harvey Dent’s villainous alter-ego Two-Face. Meanwhile, Batman also has to stop a mob war between the infamous Falcone and Maroni crime families, while simultaneously catching a serial killer nicknamed Holiday who is somehow not Calendar Man.
The Last Halloween is big enough — and popular enough (and thus lucrative enough) that the animated feature will be split into two volumes, the first one arriving sometime this winter.