He is one of the most imitated voices in pop culture: Batman growling and changing his voice so that it is not recognized that behind the hood is the millionaire Bruce Wayne. Ben Affleck did it, Christian Bale did it… and fans of the cracked voice were disappointed in ‘The Batman’ to see that Robert Pattinson’s version didn’t care if they could say “Hey, how does your voice look like to that of the Wayne son”. But why? There is a reason.
He is a most unique detective
‘The Batman’ differs from previous versions in that our hero now focuses more on the detective part. While in previous iterations of the character, Batman had dialogues but above all they were focused on Bruce Wayne, here, trying to solve a mystery, he would not stop talking. Matt Reeves explains it in the audio commentary of the filmexclusive to Apple.
I knew I didn’t want to do a Batman that had already been done, that had the growl that we’ve already seen. Because I already knew that in this version, if you’re going to do a detective story, Batman is going to have a lot of dialogue. (…) The need to solve this crime was going to require him to have long dialogue scenes in that suit and some of them are very emotional. If he growled, we wouldn’t be able to connect with him emotionally. So there was some real exploration to figure out how to make it work.
For his part, Robert Pattinson also has an opinion on the growl: if all the previous bearers of the mask did it with a deep and deep voice, he would do the opposite. Pattinson’s idea was to whisper, but he was left with an idea. When they saw the result, they asked him to stop doing it. You can’t be revenge and go whispering around corners.