With Rooster Teeth shutting down later this year, fans of the Death Battle web series are rallying on social media to try and save the show from cancellation.
If you’re unfamiliar with the show, Death Battle takes two characters with similar powers, skills, and backstories—be they from video games, anime, movies, and so on—and analyzes their strengths and weaknesses to figure out who would win in a fight to the death. While most of the show is dedicated to running down each character’s feats, each episode caps off with a fully animated fight scene, which are the real highlights of Death Battle.
The show has been running since 2010 and has evolved drastically in its roughly 14 years of runtime and 10 seasons of episodes. Its fictional hosts, Wiz and Boomstick, went from disembodied voices to their own animated characters, and the fights became more intricately animated, complete with original voice acting and music. It cultivated a dedicated fanbase who don’t want to see it cut short, especially since plans were already underway for an 11th season.
Said fanbase managed to get the hashtag #SaveDeathBattle trending on X, formerly Twitter, using it to share some of their favorite moments from its myriad fight scenes. Some of the top picks include the show’s bigger matchups, like Superman versus Goku from Dragon Ball Z (with Y0UR0NLYMATE specifically sharing their third bout), but a few of the odder or lesser-known fights were highlighted too. For example, The Potato King picked Mickey Mouse from Kingdom Hearts versus Yoda from Star Wars, while AG highlighted Goro from Mortal Kombat versus Machamp from Pokémon.
While Death Battle‘s been no stranger to discourse regarding the winners, there’s clearly a lot of love to be had for the show. Nemesis Bloodryche and MisfortuneDark credited Death Battle for getting them interested in animating and video editing respectively, while animator Luis Cruz thanked fans for reminding him of all the “awesome memories with the crew.”
There’s really no telling what will become of the show once Rooster Teeth shuts down. Warner Bros. is reportedly in talks to sell the company’s IPs, like Red vs Blue and RWBY (via Variety), but it’s unclear whether that includes Death Battle. Considering the show is all about taking characters from other IPs and making them kill one another (often gruesomely), I imagine it’s a hard sell. Having said that, presenters Chad James and Ben Singer said they’ll “see that [they] can do” and promised the Death Battle YouTube channel will stay up.
The shutdown of Rooster Teeth is only the latest in a long line of unpopular decisions by Warner Bros. Just this month, the company announced a renewed focus on making live service video games, even after Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League‘s underwhelming reception. Warner Bros. also intends to delist its entire Adult Swim Games library, much to the dismay of the games’ fans and developers.
