With the first spin-off from Matt Reeves’ The Batman, The Penguin, hinting screens in just a few short weeks, people are starting to wonder what the story of The Batman II will be and how The Penguin series will lead into it and, perhaps most pressing of all, when will The Batman sequel appear.
And we have answer to all this an more.
Firstly, The Penguin is not the only spin-off being developed (the Arkham/GCPD series is still dead though); Dylan Clark, producer of The Batman & The Penguin) goes on record to say that the Gotham City world is being explored and we’ll know more soon: “There’s another television exploration we’re going to do,We’re looking at this entire world as it relates to who Batman is — the antagonists around them, all the crime that has to be navigated in the city — and trying to figure out where are the areas that are best to explore.”
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It’s pretty clear from this that, like Burton and Nolan’s Batman universes before them, this world will not consist of superpowers, aliens or gods who tear up cities – this it seems, will be saved for the DCU which will run alongside Reeves’ world.
Co-writer Mattson Tomlin said recently that the sequel will shoot next year and this is now confirmed by Reeves himself who says the movie will shoot next year to meet the new October 2026 release date.
Reeves also confirms that star Colin Farrell will play the Penguin in the sequel too, facing off against Robert Pattinson’s Batman, with the movie picking up directly from the new series: “There are details that actually connect right into the way the next movie begins, and the way that Oz [Oswald Cobblepot AKA Penguin] enters that world as we hand the baton back to Batman, and Batman is on another case.”
But what of the story, will we see the rumoured Clayface appear? Will we see villains like Mr Freeze or Man-bat inhabit this Gotham City? Reeves, sadly, casts doubt on that ever happening: “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.”
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He does go on, explaining that they might take familiar characters and try to make them fit this world better: “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.”
So what will we see in The Batman II? Well, Reeves says that once again it will focus on the corruption of Gotham and the fact that, first and foremost, Batman is a detective, saying the story will “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. 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 adds.
Does anyone else remember in the lead-up to The Batman that there was a lot of speculation that the movie would delve into the Court of Owls story from the comics where Batman means that a mysterious cult of is secretly running Gotham and manipulating all that happens within the city limits? I really can’t help feeling that as Reeves’ story goes further and further down the corruption of Gothm story, eventually we might see Batman come face-to-face with the Owls and, as much as I want to see Batman’s more fantastical villains onscreen, that idea is very, very exciting.
Thoughts? Let me know them…
Sources: SFX,
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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