Nightwing: Bloodhunt
Genre: Action / Superhero
Director: Sam Hargrave
Writers: Jimmy Ellis & APJ
Based on DC Comics characters
Cast: Taron Egerton, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Rachel Brosnahan, Madelaine Petsch, Allesandro Borghi, John Carroll Lynch, Kyle MacLachlan, Ted McGinley
Plot: Detective Dick Grayson (Taron Egerton) leans against the hood of an unmarked cruiser, just another tired cop with all the paperwork on his mind. Amy Rohrbach (Rachel Brosnahan) steps out of the car, coffee in hand and joins him. The two talk about Mayor Hill’s address the next morning, before reaching some police tape. A young man lies slumped beside an overturned trash bin. No blood, no gunshot, just vacant eyes and a small injection mark on his arm. Around him are scattered pamphlets from a nearby shelter. Amy kneels, muttering how this is the fourth missing-turned-dead case this month. Dick crouches beside her, snapping photos. He checks the victim’s ID, then flips open a small leather notebook, not the police issue one, but his own. It’s filled with names, dates, scribbles in shorthand, a personal log of cases that don’t make the news. As uniformed officers mill around, Dick notices faint scuff marks near the fire escape - signs of a struggle. His instincts kick in: angles, trajectory, movement. For a moment, his cop mind and his vigilante mind overlap, like twin lenses. He considers climbing the escape, but Amy catches his look and shakes her head. “Don’t go scaling rooftops on me, Grayson. We’re detectives, not capes.” He forces a smile and pushes the thought away. Amy files her report for Redhorn, but Dick lingers, staring up at the fire escape. For him, this is supposed to be a routine case, another unsolved tragedy in Blüdhaven. But something about it gnaws at him, the same way it always does. As they get back into the car, Dick looks down at his hands, the faint scars still visible under his cuffs, and flexes them. He whispers to himself, “Cop not mask.” As they drive into the night.
Blüdhaven’s central plaza fills with people waving flags and clutching signs. Mayor Hamilton Hill (TBC) stands on stage in front of microphones, promising renewal for the city’s crumbling port district. His words echo across the square, obviously practiced with a glimmer of hope. Among the crowd stand Dick Grayson and Amy Rohrbach in plainclothes. Dick’s gaze lingers on the rooftops. The Mayor raises his voice: “Blüdhaven has been forgotten too long. No son of this city should ever feel abandoned.” The applause that follows is uneven and scattered. Dick catches a brief metallic glint high above, then the crack of a rifle splits the air. The crowd screams as bodies surge in every direction, and Hill collapses against the podium with a crimson bloom spreading across his suit. Dick and Amy shove through the chaos, but the shooter is already gone. Kneeling beside Hill, Dick checks for a pulse, knowing it’s futile. As EMTs rush in, his eyes fall on a small card propped neatly against the microphone stand. He slips it into his glove before anyone else notices. Written in deliberate, almost ceremonial script are the words: “A son never forgets.” Dick’s eyes narrow on the words. Legacy, Fathers, Sons. His chest tightens with memories of Bruce, of Eduardo Dorrance, of every shadow cast by family ties. Amy calls out his name, breaking the trance, and he shoves the card into his pocket with a nod. As Hill’s body is shrouded and the plaza fills with sirens, Dick’s face hardens, some things need more than policework.
Inside the Blüdhaven Police Department, the tension is suffocating as Chief Delmore Redhorn (Kyle MacLachlan) fumes in the conference room, barking that the mayor’s assassination is the department’s “biggest failure in decades” and demanding answers before the press tears them apart. Amy flips through crime scene photos, noting how surgically clean the hit was, while Dick stays quiet, arms crossed, his expression unreadable. Redhorn presses them to deliver names fast, threatening to put every cop on the street if he has to. Dick only nods, slipping his hands into his jacket pocket where the calling card rests, its words, “A son never forgets”, burning against his ribs. He says nothing about it, keeping the message hidden, too personal and too dangerous to reveal.
High above Gotham, the gears of the Clock Tower turn in steady rhythm as Barbara Gordon (Madelaine Petsch) sits at her bank of glowing monitors, her chair angled toward the blinking data streams. The assassination dominates the newsfeeds, but her attention is fixed on the grainy sniper footage she intercepted from Blüdhaven PD scanners. Running ballistics and tactical overlays, she traces the shot’s precision, military-grade, almost ritualistic, to a known signature: H.I.V.E. She speaks through the comm, her voice steady but edged with concern, telling Dick that this wasn’t a mob hit or a lone gunman, but part of something larger, coordinated, the kind of play that eats cities from the inside. Dick leans in the shadows of his apartment across the river, listening, the calling card still burning a hole in his pocket. He doesn’t show her the words yet, only asks for more on H.I.V.E.. Barbara pauses, studying his face through the camera feed, and reminds him softly that secrets have a way of festering, especially in Blüdhaven.
The port district is a maze of shuttered warehouses and half-empty shelters pressed against the docks. Dick and Amy move through the corridors of a clinic, speaking with weary staff who admit that people have been disappearing for weeks, transients, addicts, the forgotten people. On a corkboard in the back, faded photos of missing men and women overlap like a patchwork of ghosts, and Dick quietly snaps copies with his phone. Outside, they trace names against precinct records, realizing the victims aren’t scattered at random but vanish in clusters, almost like neighborhoods being systematically purged. Amy mutters that this feels like a sweep, not street crime, and Dick feels a chill as he adds the data to his private notebook. He adds that Hill must’ve been just another piece. He remembers the words on the card, “A son never forgets”, and wonders if this is the first ripple of something orchestrated, something meant to be personal.
A prison transport rolls through the outskirts of Bludhaven toward Gotham's Blackgate Prison. As two guards ride up front, a hooded and cuffed man sits in the back. The van suddenly shudders as a spike strip snakes under the tires. Rubber explodes and the vehicle jerks, scraping against the guardrail. One guard reaches for the radio, but it's dead. The back doors of the truck blast open as Slade Wilson / Deathstroke (Jean-Claude Van Damme) drops in. Before the guards even know what's happening, Deathstroke already takes them out with two quick slashes of a sword. Deathstroke then turns his sights on the hooded prisoner. The man shouts through his hood with panic. Deathstroke fires one bullet into the man's chest. He then pins a hand-written card to the prisoner's chest. When the response team rolls up, the rain has already washed most of the crime scene clean. Three bodies and not much else. They find the card on the slain prisoner - it reads: "A son never forgets".
At the Bludhaven police precinct, Amy flips through stacks of reports. The missing persons board behind her and Dick is growing by the day. Dick starts drawing lines between addresses on a map. What starts as a scatterplot tightens into a corridor - shelters, clinics, needle exchanges - all along the port district. Amy leans in, muttering how it's too clean to be coincidence. Amy then gets footage of the transport murders, freezing the frame on Deathstroke's form. Dick is confused, but decides to pursue the missing persons case more instead of focusing on Deathstroke's appearance.
Barbara sits in the Clock Tower. Her screens flicker with shipping ledgers, chemical manifest, and falsified invoices. It's clear to her that someone's buying black market anesthetics and surgical-grade tools in bulk and routing them through shell companies to make them "disappear". She manages to trace them to an abandoned meat-packing planet on the edge of the docks - a building condemned long ago. Barbara sends the coordinates of the building to Dick.
Dick sees the coordinates appear on his phone screen while parked outside the police precinct. He instantly realizes that the location sits dead-center in the cluster of disappearances. He shuts the phone and suits up as Nightwing.
Nightwing slips into the meat-packing plant through a service vent on the roof. He follows the sound of machinery through a maze of hanging plastic curtains until he steps onto the old production floor of the plant. Steel cables line the room where meat hooks once hung. Now, they hold people - half-conscious, strapped down, tubes running from their veins into barrels of chemicals. At the center of it all stands Professor Pyg (John Carroll Lynch), face hidden behind his pig mask. Around him move half a dozen "Dollotrons" - twisted men and women wearing surgical bindings, eyes vacant, moving with jerky obedience. Nightwing moves first, but the Dollotrons react instantly, converging toward Nightwing. He fights them in a tight rhythm. He uses his stun batons on them, aiming to disable them, not kill them. Pyg shrieks and lunges with a bone saw. Nightwing uses leverage from the Dollotrons near him to do a backflip away from Pyg's saw. Nightwing uses the cables to swing himself at Pyg, delivering a boot to Pyg's mask, cracking it in half. Pyg crawls toward Nightwing, but Dick uses his stun batons to incapacitate Pyg. The Dollotrons suddenly fall still. Dick looks around the room. He starts cutting the restraints of Pyg's subjects. He calls in for police reinforcements. Dick changes back into his police clothing. By the time the sirens of backup reaches the docks, Pyg is bound in his own restraints, drooling and muttering on the bloodstained floor. Once Amy arrives with the backup, Dick officially arrests Pyg. Amy asks how he got there so soon. Dick lies and says he was getting a bite to eat in the neighborhood already.
Pyg is cuffed to a table in a police interrogation room. The cracked remains of his mask sit on the table in front of him. Pyg seems pained to not be able to wear it. Across from him, Dick sits in silence, waiting for Pyg to speak. Amy leans against the wall of the interrogation room. When Pyg finally does talk, it isn't coherent. He begins rambling about perfection, obedience, the art of correction. Dick lets him ramble until the name of Pyg's benefactor slips out: Tomas Dorrance. Pyg tries to backtrack his story, but Amy is already furiously writing the name down. Pyg grins as he whispers that the "pretty piggies" he built were just prototypes, and the real work is happening elsewhere. When they step outside the interrogation room, Dick says that he thinks Deathstroke's attack on the prison transport may actually have something to do with this case after all. Amy tells Dick that he should get some sleep as he looks exhausted. Dick's mind is elsewhere though and he walks off down the corridor of the precinct.
Barbara waits for Dick in the quiet hush of the Clocktower, her screens loop the surveillance from the meat plant raid with Tomas Dorrance’s name blinking across a case file. She tells Dick plainly: Tomas is connected to H.I.V.E., but there’s still a window to bring him in legally, to prove to himself, to Bruce that Nightwing isn’t the only path. She touches Dick’s hand, reminding him that Blüdhaven needs a hero who can walk into court as a citizen, not a shadow. Dick stares at the city outside, rain streaking the glass, and wrestles with the itch in his muscles to suit up. Finally, he nods. “Badge first. Mask second.” Barbara sees the strain in him but shows pride, telling him that’s why he’ll win.
In Chief Redhorn’s cramped office, Dick and Amy lay out evidence like they’re stacking a war map, missing persons clusters, chemical purchases, Pyg’s confession fragments. Redhorn is reluctant and paranoid about optics after the mayor’s assassination, but Amy doesn’t blink and Dick keeps his voice controlled and calm. When Redhorn signs the high-risk warrant, Dick feels an electric jolt run through his body. Amy smirks, nudging him: “Look at you. A real cop.” He forces a grin, knowing he’s trying to believe it too.
Officers gather near the docks as Dick moves down the line in full Bludhaven Police Department tactical gear, badge visible - no mask. He gives the plan once, clear and direct - primary breach on the side entrance, secondary team through the loading bay, no freelance heroics. He tells everyone to follow procedure. The convoy pulls up and they move fast. A ram hits the steel doors. Once the door is breached, flashbang grenades are tossed inside. Dick leads the way in, weapon up. Amy is right behind him. Upstairs Tomas Dorrance (Alessandro Broghi) watches the feed from a bank of monitors. He sees Grayson at the front of the stack. Tomas studies him for a moment before tapping a control.
Grayson and his team moves down a corridor when Deathstroke steps out of the shadows, sword already in motion. He slashes police rifles to pieces. An officer manages to get a shot off. Slade lets the round glance off his armor before striking back. In less than half a minute, the police unit is scattered across the warehouse floor. Only then does Deathstroke turn fully toward Dick Grayson. Dick pulls out his shock batons and circles opposite Deathstroke. Dick lands a clean hit to Slade's shoulder, then another to his helmet. Slade responds with a kick that sends Dick flying to the floor. An explosion suddenly tears through a wall near them. The shockwave knocks both men off balance and fills the corridor with smoke and debris. Dick gets back on his feet, but Deathstroke is gone.
Dick decides to push through the smoke toward Tomas Dorrance, who watches them enter his control from behind his security console where he's watched everything. He calmly aims a pistol at him. Dick orders Tomas to drop the weapon. Tomas answering by firing. The first shot shatters a monitor. The second hits a doorframe near Dick's shoulder. Amy appears in the doorway behind him, weapon raised, shouting for Tomas to surrender. Tomas fires again. Amy jerks back as the round hits her vest just off-center. She slams into the wall. Dick doesn't hesitate. He fires his service pistol twice. Both shots land clean. Tomas staggers back, more surprised than afraid. He drops to his knees as his gun skids across the floor. Dick moves to Amy immediately, calling for medics as he sees blood ooze out from under her vest. As officer rush in and paramedics take Amy, Dick stays kneeling beside her. Outside, sirens build as Amy is loaded into an ambulance. Tomas Dorrance is pronounced dead on the scene.
Deathstroke moves through sewer tunnels, boots splashing through ankle-deep runoff. He moves without panic. At a junction, he plants a compact charge against an old support column and keeps walking. The detonation follows seconds later, collapsing the corridor behind him in a rush of debris and foul water, cutting off pursuit. The tunnel finally opens toward a drainage spillway that empties into Gotham Bay. Slade climbs the ladder to the surface, emerging near the dark water that separates Bludhaven from Gotham. He steps aboard a small boat and leaves the area.
Dick sits beside Amy’s hospital bed, jacket folded over the back of a chair. Monitors beep steadily while rain taps against the window. Amy lies pale but conscious, bruising visible along her ribs where the vest absorbed most of the impact. She jokes weakly that paperwork better count as light duty. Dick nods, relieved but exhausted. He tells her the warrant held, the operation was clean, and Dorrance is finished. Amy studies him for a moment and says he did things the right way. Not reckless. Not alone. Dick doesn’t answer, but the words settle. He stays there long after she falls asleep again, watching to make sure she keeps breathing before finally standing to leave.
In the Clock Tower, Barbara pulls up intercepted communications and shipping manifests moving through Blüdhaven’s port. New shell companies appear where Dorrance’s network collapsed. Replacement routes already active. She tells Dick that H.I.V.E. anticipated losses and adjusted within hours. Deathstroke wasn’t protecting the operation, he was evaluating resistance. Testing response time. Testing him. Dick listens in silence, leaning against the console as footage loops of Slade walking through the destroyed warehouse. Barbara warns that this wasn’t the last they’ve seen of Deathstroke. Dick asks her to keep digging. When the screen goes dark, he remains standing there a moment longer before heading back toward the city.
Days later, Dick moves through Blüdhaven in plainclothes, taking statements and checking in on shelters. Patrol officers nod as he passes. That night, Nightwing crosses the skyline above the same streets, moving between rooftops as squad cars roll below. Police radios chatter in his ear. He lands briefly on the precinct roof, looking out over the harbor before disappearing back into the city. Badge during the day. Mask at night. No hesitation between them anymore.
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