WIRE Buzz: Kevin Conroy back as Batman in live-read; Jeffrey Wright talks Batman, Westworld

Appearing as a live-action version of Bruce Wayne hasn't slowed Batman's iconic voice actor down one bit. In fact, Kevin Conroy (who kicked off his long run voicing the Dark Knight in all things animated with Batman: The Animated Series and appeared as a version of the hero in the Arrowverse's Crisis on Infinite Earths) is still announcing new ways he'll be voicing one of DC's most famous comic creations. Next will be during an online live-read of Batman: The Adventures Continue. 

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Conroy will be reading a chapter of the digital comic on DC’s Instagram. The read will begin on Thursday at 1:00 PM ET, seeing the actor reunite with a comic continuity he kicked off in the '90s. The Adventures Continue is from Batman: The Animated Series writers Paul Dini and Alan Burnett alongside artist Ty Templeton, putting Conroy back into a familiar tone as Batman.

This read comes about a week before the release of the series' second chapter on April 15.

Next, actor Jeffrey Wright has become one of genre's most prolific faces. He's tackling a James Bond role, Westworld, and, now as iconic Gotham cop Jim Gordon in Matt Reeves' upcoming The Batman. The latter production was sidelined due to the coronavirus pandemic while his HBO show is currently in the middle of its third season. It makes sense that he would have a good handle on where these projects were going in the future, even if things seem a little up in the air to the general geeky public.

Speaking to Collider, Wright first explained that Westworld has more than one season left in its tank, as long as HBO is willing to give it to showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. "Yeah, I know how many seasons they had, originally, in their large brains," the actor said. "They have an arc that they built from, at the start." When asked if that means more than one season after Season 3, Wright affirmed: "There very well could be, yeah. That certainly was the intent, from the start." The showrunners have teased before that they've got plans for "at least" a season beyond Westworld's current S3, but how many that really entails seems up to how much HBO is willing to pay for.

On the Gotham-set side of things, Wright said his version of Gordon was indicative not only of Reeves' take on the classic comic city but of Robert Pattinson's Bruce Wayne. "As far as the [Batman] films go, the characters, I feel, are very much specific to the interpretation of Gotham. And so, what I do is going to be very specific to Matt Reeves’ vision of Gotham, and it’s going to be reflective of what Robert Pattinson’s Batman is going to be," Wright said. 

"To pluck one character out of the whole, is a forced idea. All of us are working together to create a tone and a language and an energy and a vibe that is specific to our film. That’s what we were in the middle of doing when the alarm sounded that at least we Americans needed to get the hell out of there, so that we could get back home. That’s where we are right now, very much in the middle of things.”

Looks like the cast and crew were still developing the feel of their Gotham when things got called off, which could be why the only filming fans saw was a minor action scene of Batman motorbiking through a graveyard. The Batman still looks to release on June 25, 2021.

Finally, in a non-Batman piece of news (unless fans want to count a very tangential reference to shark repellant), Netflix has announced a new animated series called Sharkdog.

While very little has been released about the team-up between Netflix and ViacomCBS International Studios from Singaporean creator Jacinth Tan, the title is pretty self-explanatory. There's a kid, Max, and he has a Sharkdog. It's half shark and half dog. What else do could you ask for? There's gonna be slapstick and silliness aplenty...plus sharks, of course. Think Sharknado meets Marmaduke.

The CGI-animated show from One Animation is set to premiere sometime in 2021.