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Matt Reeves finally talks about his Batman movie, the influences, Affleck and more…

August 3rd, 2018 by Marc Comments

Finally Matt Reeves has spoken about the story we may see coming to life in his Batman movie and, thankfully, it’s not Year One!

We love Year One by the way, but we’ve seen that material tackled several ways from Batman Begins to Mask of the Phantasm (we know it was more Year Two), but we don’t need to see how Batman got the mask and belt and cape and Gordon again.

So, doing a press tour for TV show The Passage, Reeves was, of course, asked about Batman and if the rumours were true that it would be based on Year One (we didn’t report these rumours because, well, we knew it was nonsense).

Here’s what he said: “We’re not doing any particular [comic book].

“Year One is one of the many comic books that I love. We are definitely not doing Year One. It’s just exciting to be focused very specifically on a tale that is defining for him and very personal to him. Obviously we’re not doing an origin tale or anything like that. We’re doing a story that is definitively Batman though, and trying to tell a story that’s emotional and yet is really about him being the world’s greatest detective and all the things that for me, since I was a kid, made me love Batman.”

“I’ve talked about making it a very point of view noir-driven definitive Batman story in which he is investigating a particular case and that takes us out into the world of Gotham,” Reeves said.

“I went on a deep dive again revisiting all my favorite comics. Those all inform by osmosis. There’s no continuation of the [Christopher] Nolan films. It’s very much trying to find a way to do this as something that for me is going to be definitively Batman and new and cool.”

Reeves name dropped several influences for the movie including Frank Miller and Dave Mazzucchelli’s Year One, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sales’ The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, and Darwyn Cooke’s Batman: Ego , Neal Adams’ look for the character who took him back to his dark roots and also name dropped Bob Kane and Bill Finger and their original vision of Batman as a dark, loner detective.

Sounds awesome, right? A movie inspired by the feel and tone of Year One that will take Batman into Gotham in a noir-inspired tale? We love the sound of this!

And may we suggest The Long Halloween? Please, someone make The Long Halloween!

Anyway, now that that’s out of the way, what of the other big part of the puzzle… is Ben Affleck back as Bruce Wayne/Batman?

Well, Reeves says he’s talking to Affleck but then critically says: “There are ways in which all of this connects to DC, to the DC universe as well.

“We’re one piece of many pieces so I don’t want to comment on that except to say that I’m focused very specifically on this aspect of the DC world.”

Honestly, we always felt that when we met Batman in BvS he was almost at the end of his career and that was setting up a way to go back and tell the story of those twenty years in Gotham that came before. Let’s be honest, is Reeves is planning on making a movie where Batman is still pretty new to it all (and from the chat above it sounds like that’s the plan) then Affleck Can’t play that role! It needs to be an actor in his late 20s or early 30s… and that isn’t ol’ Ben.

“From the beginning, what I had always spoken about with Warner Brothers and what I was excited about was being in the Batuniverse and really doing something within that sphere,” Reeves goes on.

“That was always what it was going to be so in that way it hasn’t changed a lot since I first met with them. It’s very much the same thrust if that makes sense.

“A lot of things have happened since then but the movie, and why I’m excited about it, is it continues to be the same inspirations and excitement of what we talked about in the beginning.”

Imagine this.. imagine a tale where Affleck’s Batman comes across a crime or a villain that remind him of something similar twenty years before. Something form his younger days… something he will need to revisit before he can save the day.

Wouldn’t this be a great way to have two actors in the role? Meaning you can tell stories in the movies from two different times in his career with two great actors? Yeah, we thought so too.

And, with the news that Ben Affleck is attached to direct and Matt Damon to star in a true-crime story written by Jeff Maysh and published in The Daily Beast several days ago about an ex-cop who rigged the McDonald’s Monopoly game, allegedly stealing over $24 million and sharing it with an unsavory group of co-conspirators who offered kickbacks to the mastermind, it doesn’t sound like Affleck will be able to put too much effort into playing The Dark Knight for a while… does it?

 

Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….