Win, Lose or Draw

The WB's series and handful of movies, including a feature-length Batman Beyond home video due in October, hit the target most live-action films never even aim for: They don't go over children's heads or under their parents'. One 1998 Batman episode contained a wry homage to Dick Sprang's campy Batman of the 1940s and '50s and Frank Miller's explicit 1980s rendition, found in The Dark Knight Returns. A Superman episode from that same year concluded with a Jewish funeral, complete with the mourner's kaddish. Timm and his colleagues allowed their superheroes to act human without sacrificing the buzz of a comic book. No matter that Batman and Superman were still drawn; they were more flesh-and-blood than any big-screen counterpart.

Making a movie based on a comic hero seems almost contradictory: A filmmaker has to shrink a larger-than-life creation into an actor's skin and a spandex outfit, then blow him up to fill the empty screen. Directors must, in essence, turn heroes into humans, whether it's Christopher Reeve with a big red "S" or Hugh Jackman sporting Wolverine's indestructible claws in X-Men. The illusion is ruined as soon as the projector starts; the spell of a comic book is broken the moment its magic is rendered as nothing but a computer-generated special effect swirling around Halle Berry.

"You have to keep in mind that you want to do something the fans are gonna be happy with," says WB's Timm. "But, at the same time, diehard comic fans are, in the scheme of things, a real small percentage of the overall audience, so you don't want to make a movie that's just for the fans. X-Men is still going to open huge, but if it bombs, they need to ask themselves only one thing: 'Was it a good movie?' That, in the end, is all that matters."