Steve Buscemi Joins DC’s DYNAMIC DUO as a Villain as Warner Bros. Delays Release

Warner Bros. is making some moves with Dynamic Duo, the upcoming DC animated movie centered on Dick Grayson and Jason Todd.

The film has been pushed out of its summer 2028 release date, but the more interesting news is the addition of Steve Buscemi, who has joined the cast in a villainous role.

Warner Bros. has moved Dynamic Duo from June 30, 2028, to September 22, 2028. The shift takes the movie away from Paramount Pictures’ highly anticipated Call of Duty adaptation, which is currently scheduled to open on June 30.

According to Deadline, Warner Bros. also sees the new September date as a better fit for the audience it hopes to reach. Sources told the trade, "this will be a good back-to-school animated feature slot for not just K-12 but also teens and college kids. The movie has the potential to hit the Spider-Verse crowd."

That Spider-Verse comparison makes a lot of sense considering what Swaybox Studios is cooking up visually. The studio uses a technique called "Momo animation," which combines CGI, practical stop-motion elements, puppetry, and live-action performances.

Dynamic Duo will very much have a visual identity completely different from anything we’ve seen in a DC movie before.

That’s one of the biggest reasons I’m so excited about this project. There are plenty of Batman and Robin stories out there, but this feels like an opportunity to explore these characters through a genuinely unusual filmmaking style.

If Swaybox can pull off what it’s attempting, this will be one of those movies where the animation itself becomes part of the experience.

The voice cast is also getting pretty damn good. Mason Thames is rumored to play Dick Grayson, Logan Kim is Jason Todd, Lee Pace voices Red Hood One, and Buscemi will play Red Hood Two.

Buscemi joining this thing makes it even more interesting. He’s so good at playing strange, unsettling, funny, and dangerous characters, sometimes all at once, so putting him in the Red Hood side of this story sounds like a great fit.

Dynamic Duo is taking a very different approach to Dick and Jason’s histories. Warner Bros. Animation revealed at the 2026 Annecy International Animation Film Festival that the movie "follows Jason [and] Dick as [a couple] of street rats who name themselves the 'dynamic duo.'"

The two eventually head down separate paths. Dick becomes Batman’s Robin, while Jason joins the Red Hood gang.

In the comics, these two Robins have very different histories. Dick Grayson was the original Robin, becoming Bruce Wayne’s ward after his acrobat parents, the Flying Graysons, were murdered by gangsters. He eventually left Batman’s side and created his own superhero identity as Nightwing.

Jason Todd had a much rougher relationship with Batman. Bruce famously discovered him trying to steal a wheel from the Batmobile before eventually taking him in and making him the second Robin.

Jason’s rebellious streak ultimately led him into a deadly encounter with the Joker. He was later resurrected and reinvented himself as the violent vigilante Red Hood.

The movie appears to be remixing pieces of that mythology while building a new relationship between Dick and Jason before their lives become tangled up with Batman and the Red Hood gang.

When the project was originally announced in 2024, James Gunn shared his enthusiasm for what Swaybox was developing:

"Over the moon excited to announce the newest DC Studios/Warner Bros Pictures Animation greenlit film for theaters, Dynamic Duo, the story of Robin...or should I say, Robins, as in Dick Grayson and Jason Todd.

"The first feature film from the visionary Swaybox, a mix of animation, puppetry, and CGI, a script from the wonderfully talented Matt Aldrich, produced with our partners at Matt Reeves’ 6th and Idaho. This is something special."

The release-date shuffle also affects another Warner Bros. project. Chris Columbus’ new Gremlins movie has moved from November 19, 2027, to October 6, 2028.

Waiting a few extra months for Dynamic Duo isn’t ideal, but everything we’ve heard about this movie makes me incredibly curious to see it. The combination of puppetry, stop-motion elements, CGI, and live-action performance could give us something we haven’t really experienced in a superhero movie before.