With Clayface out this coming weekend, a press kit has been sent out for the movie, and Batman News got their hands on one and it has some interesting stuff on it, but none more so than an interview with The Batman writer/director Matt Reeves, in which he discusses Clayface’s origins, confirming that it originally was a spinoff from his Batman universe, long before Peter Safran and James Gunn revealed the DCU.
According to the press release, after the success of The Batman, Reeves was looking for a way of building out that universe with more grounded, dark takes on Batman characters and we’ve seen some of that already with The Penguin series and The Riddler comic series, both of which really fleshed out the universe. In a world where The Joker movie broke records and got everyone’s attention, going this road only made sense.
But with the recent rumours that The Penguin season 2 is cancelled, along with several rumoured spinoffs, the news that Clayface was originally set to face off against Robert Pattinson’s Batman makes a lot of sense.
Enter Stephen King acolyte, Mike Flanagan.
Flanagan wrote the original story for Reeves’ universe because he was a massive fan of the character and especially how his story was told in the Batman: The Animated Series episodes Feat of Clay parts one and two.
“After The Batman, I was very excited about this idea [of making smaller movies that spun out of the world of The Batman]. The Batman was not a Batman origin story, but what it did — because it was his first appearance in the city—it was an entree into origin stories for the Rogues’ Gallery,” says Reeves.
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“After the movie, when we started working on the script for the next Batman, we began thinking it’d be really exciting to develop a bunch of stories that could be genre stories that related to the Rogues’ Gallery characters and explore their origins. And one of the things I got very excited about was the idea of looking for ways to do really cool, smaller horror films.
“And [Screenwriter] Mike Flanagan came to me and said he had been a huge fan of Clayface—especially the iteration that came from the animated series—and had a passion about doing a horror story with Clayface at the core. So, we started developing it. And as that story started coming together, becoming this sort of tragic love story—The Fly meets this horror thriller—James [Gunn] and Peter [Safran] took over DC Studios, and that was one of the first things we pitched to them. They loved it so much, they wanted to make it one of the DCU movies. And we got very excited about the idea of taking this story into the DCU.”
The rumours have been circulating for a while now that, after The Batman Part 2 (and maybe part 3), Batman would make his way into the DCU with Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and all the rest, and that would be the only Batman around for the foreseeable future and, with the scrapping of The Penguin and the other long-rumoured shows, this seems to make sense.
It would also explain why Gunn wanted Clayface under the all-encompassing DCU banner instead of fleshing out Reeves’ vision.
Either way, whatever the reason, Clayface is looking pretty great and DCU or not, I can’t wait to step into an all-new vision of Gotham City.
Thoughts? I know you have them and I wanna hear ’em all.
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Source: Batman News
Marc
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….
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