'Merry Little Batman' Director Talks 'Home Alone' Homage, Says 'It's Always Sunny...' Star David Hornsby 'Nailed It' as Joker (Exclusive)

Every holiday season a number of great new specials debut to bring a little more joy to our wintery celebrations, and 2023 has been no different. Among the best new Christmas specials this year is Merry Little Batman, an animated movie starring DC Comics' most prolific vigilante, Bruce Wayne, and his son, Damian. Recently, PopCulture.com had a chance to chat with Merry Little Batman director Mike Roth, who also wrote the story alongside Jase Ricci and Morgan Evans. During our conversation, Roth noted the movie's homage to iconic Christmas movie Home Alone, and also praised It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia actor David Hornsby who "nailed it" in his voice role as The Joker.

In Merry Little Batman, Damian is left home alone on Christmas Eve while Batman heads out into the snow to take on Gotham's worst supervillains. While spending his time idolizing his hero dad, Damian learns of a plot by the Joker and other nefarious bad guys to steal Christmas, so he suits up to fight them away from Wayne Manor, though the battle eventually spills out into the streets of Gotham. There's no denying the Home Alone homage in the early parts of the movie, which is something Roth says was always part of their approach to the story. "The Home Alone angle was baked in from the very, very beginning. That was part of the initial pitch. What if Batman was a kid? Burglars break in. That's very much where it began. So yeah, it's always been there."

He then went on to note, "I think if anything, it was like as we were building it out, we're moving further and further away from that. Well, it's not Batman, we want to see Batman. You know what I mean? So it's Batman's kid. And from there it's like we can't have a whole story. We could Gotham with all these villains and Joker's not going to break into Wayne Manor. You know what I mean? So it's like we got to get Damian out of the house." 

Roth continued, "So what kind of began as more Home Alone just got squished down to a sequence. That, I mean, out of the house and into Gotham and see this huge expansive world because we built a different kind of Gotham. And, it was important for us for the audience to see all of that and see that world that we built."

The movie features an impressive voice cast, with Luke Wilson lending his voice to Bruce Wayne / Batman and Yonas Kibreab as Damian Wayne / Little Batman. There's also James Cromwell as Alfred Pennyworth, This Is Us alum Chris Sullivan as Bane, Veep actor Reid Scott as Commissioner Gordon, and Hornsby as Batman's longtime arch nemesis, The Joker, who Roth says "crushed it."

"For us, the story is through Damian's perspective, so it's through a child's perspective, but the exposition of that is Joker who we crafted him also kind of childish," he explained. "He's very petulant. He's got these temper tantrums. He swings happy to angry to murderous. So we needed those really quick changeups. We needed him to get dark, we needed him to be funny. When we got a David Hornsby audition, it was like, 'That's it.' He nailed it right out of the gate, and he really understood the character. I mean, it was just such a pleasure working with him. He brought so much humor to it." Merry Little Batman is now streaming on Prime Video.