DC Comics fans have long wished for an animated adaptation of the 1996 miniseries, Kingdom Come from Mark Waid and Alex Ross. And it seems they came close to getting their wish granted before Warner Bros. decided to end the DCEU and James Gunn's DC Studios rose to prominence.
When ScreenRant asked the development team why there's been no Kingdom Come animated film yet, Justice League: Warworld producer coyly Jim Krieg responded, "Well, we'll put it in the hopper."
However, War World executive producer Butch Lukic was a bit more forthcoming, sharing, "We originally talked about Kingdom Come after this, but changing regimes, we couldn't go forward with anything like that."
He went on to add, "They might incorporate it in the future with the New World, but that was one that we talked about as an obvious possibility to continue. Not this continuity, but something more Justice League and larger. Again, it's personal and individual stuff that I would like to do, and I like the one comic book or two comic book issue stories."
It seems there's a bit of fear that they would need to cut too many storylines from a four-issue miniseries like Kingdom Come to fit the animated home video format.
In November 2022, newly appointed CEO of DC Studios James Gunn tweeted out a picture from Kingdom Come, sparking fan speculation that Gunn has his own plans for the beloved graphic novel.
Kingdom Come is a futuristic Elseworlds tale set in DC Universe, 20 years after the events of DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths. In this future, the world has become a more dangerous place, and superheroes have become increasingly powerful and violent. Superman, who has retired from superheroics, is forced to come out of retirement to lead a group of old-school superheroes against a new generation of violent and reckless superheroes.
In the past, DC Animated Universe veteran Bruce Timm went in-depth to explain why Kingdom Come is difficult to adapt.
"The one that we hear all the time is Kingdom Come and I have to, like, crush everyone's dream every single time because it's just not within the scope of what we can do with these movies. The main thing that people remember from Kingdom Come, beyond the story, is the look. It was Alex Ross, breaking big, doing "photorealistic superheroes", so if we did an animated version of Kingdom Come it would not look like that. We don't have the money, there isn't enough money on the planet to make it look like that, so there's really no reason to do it. Automatically, they would be disappointed, that'd be the number one thing on amazon and amazon reviews would be "one star – doesn't look like Alex Ross."
However, these comments were made back in 2017 and perhaps there's been enough technological breakthroughs with AI to produce something similar to Alex Ross' style.
There have also been several two-part DC animated films in recent memory, so that would also be another option for Kingdom Come, as a way to ensure all the essential storylines make it into a potential film.