Superman The New Frontier
 

With the release of Superman Doomsday last Tuesday, the next animated film in the Warner Home Video series based on DC Universe stories will be Justice League: The New Frontier.

The film, based on Darwyn Cooke's series, is slated for early next year.

Gregory Noveck, senior vice president, creative affairs at DC Comics, said New Frontier was a natural for the series.

"As soon as I read New Frontier, when I read Darwyn's work, I was like, 'This is the best thing I've read in 10 years,'" Noveck said. "I loved it. It spoke to me. I thought it was just so powerful.

"And looking at Darwyn's linework you could see that this was something you could actually do in animation. You could translate it fairly faithfully without messing it up too much. And, for me, the story was very clear.

"I pushed really hard. And there weren't a lot of naysayers."

While challenging, Noveck said that cutting the sprawling comics story to a film was successful.

"Obviously in the adaptation, you had 400 pages of stuff that we had to window down to 72 minutes, so you're losing a lot there," Noveck said. "Stan Berkowitz in the original draft actually did a fairly amazing job of keeping the good stuff you needed to really tell the story and incorporating as much as humanly possible.

"And then when Darwyn ultimately did his polish, we actually added more stuff in. Stuff that we had lost, because it didn't necessarily move the story forward, but for us it was just like, wouldn't it be great to have this scene in because you remember it so much from the book?"

The cast of New Frontier includes David Boreanaz as Green Lantern, Kyle MacLachlan as Superman, Lucy Lawless as Wonder Woman, Jeremy Sisto as Batman, Neil Patrick Harris as Flash and Brooke Shields as Carol Ferris.

"With the whole line of the DC Universe animated movies, we want to get name voice talent whereever possible, just to help publicize it, and get people who haven't done this stuff before," Noveck said.

The film is produced by Bruce Timm, Michael Goguen and Cooke and directed by David Bullock.

Noveck told The Continuum he is pleased with the progression of DC properties into the televison and film worlds -- and this was before recent news of a live-action Justice League.

"When I started this gig four years ago, we had Catwoman," Noveck said. "Since then we've got a lot more in development. We're rolling on Watchmen, we've got Losers on the runway, we've got Dark Knight in production. We've got this whole line of animated movies. We're reinvigorating Smallville with Supergirl.

"This year my personal goal is to get some pilots at least that aren't necessarily based on super-heroes, but maybe some off the Vertigo line or WildStorm line.

"We're slowly building. DC is a fairly big company and Time-Warner is a really big company, so it's like turning the proverbial aircraft carrier to go in this certain direction."