Bloomberg made an interesting revelation about WB Games Montreal in their recent report about WB Games.
WB Games Montreal was founded as a support studio for Rocksteady. Their first project was actually Batman: Arkham City – Armoured Edition, a version of the game made exclusively for the Wii U in 2012. A year later they made the title they were best known for, Batman: Arkham Origins.
Nearly a decade later, they came out with Gotham Knights, a live service title set in an alternate universe to the Arkham universe. Gotham Knights was poorly received upon release, but even its shortcomings would be forgotten in the shadow of the terrible release of Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League.
Gotham Knights seemed to have put WB Games Montreal in a bad situation, with some games press and fans speculating that WB Games might decide to axe the studio. But as soon as December 2022, two months after Gotham Knights was released, an employee confirmed that they were working on their next project on LinkedIn.
Subsequently, last year we reported on WB Games Montreal job listings. In March, they claimed to be working on a AAA title based on a popular franchise. In October, they said in a job listing that they were “working on AAA titles set in the DC Comics Universe.”
Bloomberg recently reported that WB Games Montreal is currently pitching a Game of Thrones project, but are currently helping on Monolith Productions’ Wonder Woman game. But that’s not all they revealed.
Based on their sources, after releasing Gotham Knights, WB Games Montreal were pitching video games to management featuring specific DC Comics characters. This may be what WB Games Montreal’s job listings were alluding to.
The first project they pitched would have been based on Hellblazer, AKA John Constantine. This game would be leapfrogging off of the 2005 Keanu Reeves film Constantine, and it actually got attention from Ben Bell, then VP of production at Warner Brothers.
This Constantine did not move forward because WB would not agree to a timeframe or budget. It was Bell who suggested they could work on other DC characters instead. Bell named two characters, Joker, or the Flash.
WB Games Montreal decided to go with the Flash video game. Maybe they hoped the Flash movie’s success would lend weight to their project, but we don’t need to tell you what happened after that.
So WB Games did work on a Flash video game for some time. While Bloomberg confirmed it was cancelled, it looks like they might have kept working on it even after the film’s disastrous release.
For those who don’t remember, while the 2005 Constantine film raised the character’s profile, it was both a commercial and critical disappointment. Even comic book fans were divided because of the big changes it made to the character, Keanu’s star power aside.
So as perplexing as it may seem, WB Games had good reason to reconsider making a Constantine video game. One does wonder if WB Games Montreal would have found commercial success with a Joker video game, regardless of how good it would have turned out.
All three of these games would have been dream projects in any previous period in the video game industry. The sixth generation in particular was a productive midpoint where video games were getting more impressive graphically, but were also small enough in scale and budget that risky projects like Constantine had a decent chance of being successful.
But we do remember that that generation was not particularly kind to comic book licensed video games, so maybe it wouldn’t have turned out well. Regardless, we can’t help wondering what could have been if these ideas actually went forward and became real games. And that’s because, sadly, WB Games Montreal is definitely not in a place where they would take risks and experiment like that today.
