This year marks the 85th anniversary of Detective Comics #27, the first appearance of Batman. DC has been celebrating eight-and-a-half decades of the Dark Knight all year, and now Warner Bros. is getting in on the party with a massive new release. Ten classic animated Batman movies have been packaged in a fresh 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray box set dubbed the Batman 85th Anniversary Collection.
Releasing on September 10th and priced at $205 (pre-order here), the collection features a 24-page booklet alongside the 10 discs. The featured movies are: Batman: Year One, Batman: Assault on Arkham, Batman: The Killing Joke, Batman and Harley Quinn, Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Batman: Soul of the Dragon, Batman: Long Halloween Part 1, Batman: Long Halloween Part 2, Batman Hush, Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham.
Fans will note that some of these are true classics; Mask of the Phantasm is easily one of the greatest Bat-films ever made, the Long Halloween and Year One movies are fantastic adaptations of beloved stories, and Assault on Arkham and Soul of the Dragon are fun original concepts.
However, critically divisive entries like The Killing Joke and Batman and Harley Quinn might seem like odd inclusions. The simple reasoning is this 4K Ultra HD collection only features films previously released in the format, hence the lack of favorites like Under the Red Hood and the Dark Knight Return adaptations.
Still, the Batman 85th Anniversary Collection should be catwoman nip to DC Animated Universe diehards, and newcomers are likely to be surprised at how much better most of these animated Batman movies are than most of the DCEU’s live action attempts. Pre-orders are live now on Amazon, and you can revisit the Batman: Mask of the Phantasm trailer below.
As for the future of Batman in cartoon form, Prime Video recently revealed the first trailer for Batman: Caped Crusader, the new show from Batman: The Animated Series producer Bruce Timm, J.J. Abrams, and The Batman director Matt Reeves. That’s set to debut on August 1st. Meanwhile, we’re still waiting on more news about director Andy Muschietti’s The Brave and the Bold, the new Batman movie set in Peter Safran and James Gunn’s rebooted DC Universe, and Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga’s Joker: Folie à Deux is due in theaters on October 4th.