“I care, Joker. About Gotham. About justice! And if it has to end, at least I got out like this… being Batman!”

The final line spoken by iconic Batman voice actor Kevin Conroy, who sadly passed away in November 2022 after a private battle with intestinal cancer, would be incredibly poignant had it not been uttered in a throwaway scene in “Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths Part Three.” Based on the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” storyline from DC Comics, written and illustrated by the legendary duo behind DC’s 80s smash hit series “The New Teen Titans,” Marv Wolfman and George Pérez (who also tragically lost his battle with cancer in 2022), this trilogy of direct-to-video animated adaptations closes the book on the second phase of the DC Animated Universe, dubbed the “Tomorrowverse” by fans. For the second time in less than five years, DC has taken a meticulously constructed interconnected series of animated films and wiped the slate clean with the same narrative care as one takes when shaking the image out of an Etch A Sketch, leaving fans to ponder the question: “Why should we care?”

“Part Three” picks up right where “Part Two” left off, with Supergirl (under the manipulation of Psycho Pirate) having just murdered her surrogate father, The Monitor, and the trilogy’s big bad, The Anti-Monitor, preparing to wipe out all of our cosmically displaced heroes. The Monitor’s death releases a powerful surge of energy that transports the remaining Earths into The Bleed — an inter-dimensional plane that forms the barriers of the multiverse — buying our heroes some time to figure out a way to stop the Anti-Monitor’s onslaught of attacks. While a group of heroes led by the “Tomorrowverse’s” Superman begrudgingly work with a Lex Luthor variant to find a way to kill the Anti-Monitor, Batman leads a team on an investigation into John Constantine, who we just learned in the previous installment is the babbling homeless man that has appeared in many “Tomorrowverse” movies warning our protagonists about the end of times. As it turns out, this John Constantine is the same John Constantine from the previous iteration of the DC Animated Movie Universe, who used his magic to compel the Flash to travel back in time and rewrite history in “Justice League Dark: Apokolips War.”

This new world that The Flash created was first seen in 2020’s “Superman: Man of Tomorrow” (hence the name), and just under four years and ten movies later, DC has elected to once again clear the board and start anew. The practice of rebooting the timeline is quite common at DC Comics, as the main DC Universe seems to reset its continuity more and more frequently as the years roll along. “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” the comic, started this trend back in April of 1985, as Wolfman desired to rid comic fans of the unfriendly concept of the multiverse — a narrative device the company primarly used to explain away continuity errors — and streamline all of DC’s continuity into one single, unified history.

With the original “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” DC’s fictional history was succinctly divided into the “pre-Crisis” and “post-Crisis” periods, but it wouldn’t stop there. Since the last issue of “Crisis on Infinite Earths” was released in March of 1986, there have been eight DC Comics “crises,” which have reshaped the continuity and significantly impacted DC’s entire publication line. In a hilarious stroke of irony, an event conceived with the sole purpose of doing away with the multiverse concept would spawn countless returns to this narrative device, which would eventually leap off the comic book pages and onto the silver screen.

Now, multiverses are all the rage, as both DC and Marvel have utilized this idea to showcase various versions of the same character on screen, as well as bring actors back to their iconic roles as a way of trading on the nostalgia of their audiences. This very week, “Deadpool & Wolverine” will be released into theaters, dragging Hugh Jackman off the Broadway stage and back into a role he has played for as long as I have been alive. Through the power of the multiverse, no character has to die, no actor has to leave a role behind, and no one has to grow up, because why would you ever want to dine on anything new if your childhood can be reheated for the rest of eternity?

But what does the advent of the multiverse represent in animation? As the “Spider-Verse” films have shown us, the multiverse offers an opportunity to blend various animation styles together, creating a unique experience. In this last chapter in the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” trilogy, DC does just that, drawing from its extensive history of successful and renowned animated projects. Fans are treated to glimpses of the quintessential Batman adaptation, “Batman: The Animated Series,” the crown jewel of the DCAU, “Justice League: Unlimited,” the early aughts fan-favorite “Teen Titans,” the niche but beloved “Green Lantern: The Animated Series,” and even the Hanna-Barbera produced classic, “Super Friends.” To call the revisitation of these adored adaptations brief would be an overstatement, as all of them are on screen just long enough to be wiped out by a wave of anti-matter.

In theory, I respect what director Jeff Wamester and screenwriter James Krieg are trying to communicate. When attempting to explain why these pesky Anti-Monitors keep popping up like antibodies no matter what the heroes do, a character in the film literally says, “The multiverse is a cancer.” In many ways, the filmmakers behind “Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths” hit the nail right on the head, as we are seeing that cancer erode cinema before our very eyes, but in this case, the call is coming from inside the house.

Over the last seventeen years, DC has released an average of three direct-to-video animated films like “Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths” a year. Initially, this series of films focused on adapting the most famous and influential storylines from DC Comics’ catalog, but with the rise in popularity of cinematic universes, these animated movies took it upon themselves to serialize their stories, starting in 2013 with “Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox.” While early DC animated films like “Wonder Woman” (2009) and “Green Lantern: First Flight” felt ahead of the curve, providing clear blueprints for the live-action films that would follow them, the more recent crop of DC animated movies have felt reactionary, following the lead of whatever the live-action movies are doing. I used to look forward to every release, as the DC Universe's Original Animated Movies were extremely formative on my love of comics, collection of physical media, and appreciation of animation. Somewhere along the line, as the animation got cheaper and cheaper, the voice acting became more stilted and awkward, and the films themselves became episodic in nature, this once great passion became a chore I only maintain out of a sense of obligation.

So, as we close the book on the “Tomorrowverse” and stare down the barrel of an already announced two-part adaptation of “Watchmen,” I pose the question: What do we want from DC’s line of direct-to-home video animated features? Do we want another coordinated cinematic universe that requires homework to be fully enjoyed, only to have that accumulated history wiped clean at the very end? Do we want DC to return to one-off adaptations of our favorite comic book storylines? Even the very best of these adaptations are truncated distillations that pale in comparison to the comics they are based on. Is it utterly preposterous to suggest that we want original stories? It certainly couldn’t hurt to take some bigger swings with these characters in a relatively low-stakes environment. Or perhaps the answer is even more straightforward, as the sales performance of these films paints a pretty clear picture; it doesn’t matter what these movies look like, how talented the voice actors who perform in them are, or what the story is about, as long as it has Batman in the title.