The premiere of ‘The Batman’ has been a complete success for Warner. The film has swept the box office and has also garnered rave reviews. Obviously, the unanimity is not total, but everything indicates that it will be the beginning of a long franchise with Robert Pattinson giving life to the DC superhero. In fact, the end of the film directed by Matt Reeves plants several seeds for the future and the filmmaker has now wanted to explain certain aspects of its outcome.
If you do not want SPOILERS of ‘The Batman’, do not continue reading
Much commented on has been the fact that Barry Keoghan plays in ‘The Batman’ a new incarnation of joker. Of course, he was on the verge of not appearing in the film, but Reeves finally knew that the film worked better with that scene, since, according to Variety, “it changes people’s response to the end of the movie, we see that Gotham is still Gotham and that Batman really didn’t have a choice. He has to keep doing what he does“. The director of ‘Monstrous’ is referring to the previous sequence that Batman shares with Catwoman (Zoe Kravitz):
Because when Selena tells him “This place is never going to change”, you hadn’t seen that, that the problems were already afoot. You feel a bit like “Couldn’t you go with her” Go with her! What is your problem, what the hell is wrong with you? “She changes everything emotionally. She doesn’t feel the same.
There will be no Joker in the sequel
However, Reeves wanted to make it very clear that this it does not suppose that Joker is going to be the villain of the inevitable second installment or even just make an appearance at some point:
I was never trying to say, “Look, it’s Joker and he’s going to be in the next movie!” The idea was “If you think the problems are going to go away from Gotham, you can write it off. They’re already there.”
On the state in which Gotham is at the end of ‘The Batman’Reeves has also made an interesting reflection in an interview with The New York Times in which he points out the following:
We have left the world at a very specific point at the end of history. Corruption has dominated Gotham for a long time. The events of the film create the first ray of hope the city has had in at least 20 years, but they also shattered the power vacuum. It means it’s also one of the scariest moments the city has seen in over 20 years.
What has been completed in ‘The Batman’ is the character arc what Reeves had in mind for the character played by Pattinson: “I wanted him to go from being someone who projects revenge to someone who makes people understand that there is someone in the shadows, that there is hope“.
The parallels with the assault on the Capitol
For this, the final attack by Enigma and his men was decisive, in which it is difficult not to find parallels with the attempted storming of the United States Capitol in January 2021. The filmmaker comments on the following:
The script was written long before all that. I would not want to be so direct because that, for me, would be exploiting it. I wanted to do something that was like a resonance of the way we live, and when things started to line up in a certain way, it would be shocking to me. On January 6th it happened, and we were really into filming. We were all very upset, but it was also unsettling the way certain things resonated. Obviously, it is different, but there are similarities.
That gave rise to some discomfort during the filming, but finally the possibility of changing it was ruled out because “was essential to the story” and because “we thought it was different enough“.