DC Studios Expands Animated Slate With Absolute Batman, a Joker Anime, and a Krypto Series

DC Studios and Warner Bros. Animation used the 2026 Annecy International Animation Film Festival to outline a trio of animated series that pull in markedly different directions. The slate includes a direct adaptation of Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta’s Absolute Batman comic, a kids-oriented Krypto the Superdog show, and Joker: Laugh Riot, DC’s first ever anime project.

The Absolute Batman series carries over the creative team from the comic that helped launch DC’s Absolute Universe and, for a stretch, pushed the publisher past Marvel in market share for the first time since 2002. Snyder will serve as executive producer and showrunner, with Dragotta as producer. The story radically reworks the character: Bruce Wayne is a blue-collar civil engineer from Crime Alley, not a billionaire, raised by a single parent after his teacher father is killed in a mass shooting. His gear is self-built and brutalist—a chest emblem doubling as an axe, cowl ears that become throwing knives, a spike-studded mechanical cape. The series also reimagines Gotham’s rogues as childhood acquaintances, while turning the Joker into a corrupt, possibly immortal tycoon, inverting the usual class dynamic between the two.

The Joker anime, Joker: Laugh Riot, inverts the narrative in another way: after Batman is murdered, the Joker becomes the investigator, hunting through Gotham’s underworld for the killer who robbed him of his obsession. Japan’s SOLA Entertainment co-produces, with Yasuhiro Aoki—director of the anime ChaO and a collaborator on the 2024 film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim—attached to direct. The premise forces the character to confront a vigilante’s path, a turn that leans on identity crisis more than chaos.

The Krypto series, from creator C.H. Greenblatt (Chowder, Harvey Beaks), is a lighter proposition. The super-dog falls in with a group of criminals and inadvertently reforms them. Following his appearance in Superman and a co-starring role in the upcoming Supergirl, the show cements Krypto as a small-screen property in his own right.