Matt Reeves is gearing up to start production of The Batman II and is teasing what to expect from the sequel starring Robert Pattinson.
The filmmaker gave a timeframe for starting filming the DC Studios film and explained how HBO’s The Penguin series will be tied to the superhero film.
“The plan is to shoot next year, and we’re finishing up the script now,” Reeves told SFX magazine for its October 2024 issue. “Colin [Farrell] will be part of the movie. We’ve shared [the script] as we’ve been going along with DC and the studio and they’re super excited.”
Reeves noted that The Penguin, which stars Farrell as the Gotham City villain, is the “entry point” to the Batman sequel and it’s “absolutely connected to where we leave things in the series.”
“There are details that actually connect right into the way the next movie begins, and the way that Oz enters that world as we hand the baton back to Batman, and Batman is on another case,” Reeves added.
The director said that he wants “these stories to be a meditation on the way Gotham is the way it is. It’s such a brutal place and we’re digging for the answers as to why these people’s lives are this way.”
Reeves added that The Batman II is “going to dig into the epic story about deeper corruption, and it goes into places that he couldn’t anticipate in the first one. The seeds of where this goes are all in the first movie, and it expands in a way that will show you aspects of the character you never got to see.”
“Batman is constantly battling these forces. But those forces can’t be entirely exorcised. So the next movie delves deeper into that,” he said.
DC Comics fans hoped Reeves would introduce the supervillain Gentleman Ghost, but the filmmaker says that’s not happening in the universe he’s creating.
“What was important to me was to find a way to take these pop icons, these mythical characters that everybody knows, and translate it so that Gotham feels like a place in our world. We might push to the edge of the fantastical but we would never go into full fantastical. It’s meant to feel quite grounded,” he said.
Reeves continued, “It doesn’t mean that you won’t see characters that people love. That’s exactly what we want to do. Gentleman Ghost is probably pushed a bit too far for us to be able to find a way to do, but there is a fun way to think about how we would take characters that might push over into a bit of the fantastical and find a way to make sense of that.”
In Bruce Timm’s Batman: Caped Crusader animated series, Gentleman Ghost will appear.