The Batman II director Matt Reeves has shared an update on the film’s villain and what they have in store for Robert Pattinson’s iteration of the DC hero.
Speaking to Josh Horowitz at Sunday’s Emmys, Reeves said that the new movie will centre on Bruce Wayne compared to the the first, which “is so focused on Batman.”
“[In] a lot of the other films, which I love, once you get past the origin tale, which we didn’t quite do, but we did something that referred to his origins, then you start telling the Rogues Gallery story and that character’s sort of arch,” he said.
“But I never wanted to lose [Robert Pattinson] at the centre of these stories, and so that is really what we set our aim on.”
With this in mind, the 59-year-old teased that the antagonist will be crucial to the new approach and will be a character that has “never really been done in a movie before”.
Pattinson’s first outing as Batman saw him tackle Paul Dano’s The Riddler, who was reimagined from an intelligent trickster to a sadistic serial killer who enjoyed leaving clues about his victims.
Across the numerous Batman films over the decades, fans have become familiar with foes such as The Joker, Catwoman, The Penguin, Two-Face, Bane, Scarecrow and Poison Ivy, all of which have been portrayed with varying degrees of success.
As the original 2022 film adopted one of the darkest tones for a superhero film in recent memory, it’s possible that The Batman II could be considering characters like sociopathic surgeon Hush, maniacal psychologist Hugo Strange or the highly skilled mercenary Deathstroke.
It’s unlikely the film would go down a more surreal and comedic route but it’s always possible that obscure villains from Batman’s rogues gallery, like Kite Man, Professor Pyg, Calendar Man or The Ventriloquist, could be reinvented with a darker approach.
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Another option could be Clayface, who is set to be a part of James Gunn’s recently relaunched DC Universe. Although Gunn has maintained that Reeves’s Batman films are not part of the same universe, a movie about the shapeshifting Batman villain is set to be released in 2026 with Tom Rhys Harries in the lead role.
Regardless, Reeves told Variety that the script for The Batman II is being kept firmly under wraps to protect it from leaks. “We put [the script] into a secret pouch that literally has a lock on it with a code,” he said. “[Pattinson] was in New York at the time, and everything is high security.”