Amazon Set as Home for ‘Creed’ Franchise and ‘Batman: Caped Crusader’
The Creed franchise has a bright future at Amazon, and so does Batman in animated form.
The Creed name lives
According to Deadline, Michael B. Jordan has been in conversations with Amazon Studios, which owns MGM (house of the Creed IP) since two years ago, to expand the film sub-franchise into a variety of projects. While no formal agreement has been made yet, the ongoing conversations (which have only become more passionate since Creed III made $100M+ on its global debut starting on March 3) would entail an anime series (which will surprise no one that has seen Creed III and spotted its many anime references, a genre Michael B. Jordan is very passionate about) as well as multiple live-action tie-in series that would include one focused on Creed’s daughter, Amara, who was played in the threequel by Mila Davis-Kent. The deaf actress had her own story perfectly set up by the film, without giving any spoilers away.
More feature films are also in the cards, and the threequel’s overperformance should only increase their chances of happening. In the meantime, though, Robert Lawton was hired a few months ago to write a script for a spin-off film focused on the Drago family — Viktor Drago (Florian Munteanu) was the antagonist of Creed II and returned for the third film. Now, he and his on-screen father (played by Dolph Lundgren) would be getting their own story. Apparently, there was talk of turning it into a series, but the film concept has endured so far.
And perhaps most interesting of all, Deadline is also confirming there have been on-and-off talks about exploring the character of Rocky Balboa and his origins for years at MGM, even prior to the Amazon acquisition. Jeff Sneider first said in a recent episode of The Hot Mic With Jeff and John that Amazon was looking at six different properties from the MGM catalog to exploit, Rocky being one of them. Apparently, Sylvester Stallone, who created the character (whose ownership rights are a giant mess), would be involved.
Batman: The New Animated Series
Staying on the topic of Amazon and their future TV projects, The Hollywood Reporter is saying that Batman: Caped Crusader, the new animated series backed by J.J. Abrams, Matt Reeves, and Bruce Timm (Batman: The Animated Series), has found a new home at Amazon. The project was initially being developed for HBO Max, but after David Zaslav started cutting down on expenses, the studio scrapped plans for it and started shopping it elsewhere.
The project is now set up at Amazon, which has ordered two seasons — Warner Bros. had ordered a 10-episode season back when it was first announced. Details are still fuzzy as the deal has not been finalized. The timeline for the series is also uncertain at this point, but we expect development to be much more steady going forward for the creatives involved. Stay tuned for more news on that.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
