All of the DC Extended Universe fan attention right now is on the forthcoming "Snyder Cut" of Justice League, but a post on Instagram by a costume designer who worked on Batman v Superman has shed some light on an overlooked detail of Snyder's DCEU. Specifically, it's what happened to Robin, Batman's partner, before the film even started.
Fans of the film already knew that Robin was dead, since the wreckage of his costume was on display in the Batcave, but it was less clear which Robin had died or how. Now, thanks to social media, the crew on the films have established that the first Robin, Dick Grayson, is dead in the DCEU, murdered and subsequently set on fire by the Joker.
Dick's death was initially confirmed back in June by David Ayer, who wrote via Tweet that it had been Snyder's original intention that Dick had died. This is reportedly what was meant by the deleted scene in Ayer's Suicide Squad, where Ben Affleck's Batman spoke about how the Joker had "[taken] something important" from him. Snyder had also said, in a 2017 IGN interview, that his plan had been that Robin had been dead for a full 10 years by the time BvS started, "during some run-in with a young Joker."
An old post on Instagram by Douglas Stewart, costume designer on BvS, adds more detail. "He was brutally murdered and then set ablaze by the Joker," Stewart writes. "The story had to be told in the salvaged costume on display inside the Batcave. Aging and specialty distressing needs to tell these unscripted tales that support the main framework of the film. Here we had to create a Robin Suit in a matter of days... it was a lot of fun."
As is occasionally the case in DC spinoff material, Robin's death is a sort of continuity beerslam. In the comics, Dick Grayson managed to survive his years as Robin and would grow up to adopt the new costumed identity of Nightwing. It was his successor, Jason Todd, who died at the hands of a crowbar-wielding Joker, in a notorious promotional stunt in the '80s where fans could call a 1-900 number to vote on whether or not Jason would survive the encounter.
Naturally, because comics, Jason didn't stay dead. In the 2000s, he became a gun-wielding anti-hero known as the Red Hood, who currently stars in his own solo book from DC. It's anyone's guess whether or not Jason might make his way into the DCEU as a replacement for Dick, but Jason's whole deal—an angry, pistol-waving, homicidal jackass who's still nominally a superhero—seems very much like it would be in Snyder's general ballpark.
Snyder himself has said that as far as he's concerned, the next Robin in his DCEU would be Carrie Kelley, the young slingshot-wielding Robin from Frank Miller's famous 1986 bad-future story, The Dark Knight Returns. In other words, should Snyder get his way, the DCEU will continue its headlong rush into maximum grimdark.
Zack Snyder's Justice League will air on HBO Max at an unspecified date in 2021.
Source: Digital Spy