The Batman General News & Discussion Thread - Part 2

[emielaen]

The Batman just made $800M and no other Batman will have popped up for years once Flash comes out. I think it'll be alright. I honestly don't see your everyday moviegoer seeing the Flash trailer with Affleck and Keaton and saying "I'm not going cause Pattinson"

People didn't like that BvS and JL weren't good. Not because Batman was involved.

 

[AndrewGilkison]

The big difference is that Marvel created their own movie studio before Disney bought them, so they had the infrastructure in place to basically treat their movies the same way they treat their comics (Kevin Feige is basically the Editor In Chief of MS, much like Stan Lee and Jim Shooter and Joe Quasada were for the comics).

WB never did this with DC. That infrastructure didn't (and still doesn't) exist for them, which is why their attempts have been such a cluster****.

 

[solidsnake86]

With respect to the batman issue in the DCU I actually don't think it's that complicated. By the time James Gunn and Safran actually get their first DCU movie going as the acting heads, presumably the Superman movie, you are looking at a 2025 release date. That will likely be a standalone Superman movie with easter eggs to a larger DCU.

Make Pattinson the DCU batman, you don't need to have Reeves' movies reference the larger DCU at all and by the time they get production going on other movies, Reeves will be finished with his trilogy.

Just look at what Gunn did with The Suicide Squad movie. It's a movie that could be a sequel, references the DCU, but isn't all that connected to the previous movie because it wasn't necessary to connect it.

Other DCU movies can reference Batman if they want. Even if you get Pattinson to show up it wouldn't really matter to Reeves.

 

[cryptic name]

If they cancel reeves batman or disrupt his movies then im done with DC for good.

I would feel the same way but it doesn’t seem like that’s gonna happen. They’ve been pretty clear about their enthusiasm for his Batman.

 

[SwordOfMorning]

I’m fine with Pattinson being in the main universe. It’s all so ****ed up now though. Wish all of this nonsense could’ve been avoided.

The Batman should’ve been the same universe from the beginning. Shouldn’t have been Affleck and Pattinson, wish it could have been one or the other. Maybe they should’ve just gotten Pattinson for BVS. Keaton for Beyond or Kingdom Come only.

Idk how they can clean this up without it feeling convoluted and losing audience interest. It seems like the audience is growing tired of all these different Batmen. DC just hasn’t caught on in the same way as Marvel and I think the non-interconnected nature of it is a big part of it.

It seems hard to tell if the audience is getting tired of multiple Batmen given I strongly doubt most of them are even aware that there's going to be a movie with Keaton in it and Batfleck made virtually no mainstream cultural impact. The cycle of reboots might be a bit tiring for some but if you ask a random person who the current Batman is they're not gonna rattle off all three of them.

 

[DeadlyWest]

I do think we're somewhat overthinking the casual audience's overall investment honestly.

Most people aren't gonna care enough to try and keep track of timelines and whatnot. They just watch whatever new movies come out with these comic book characters they've watched their whole lives. They might be a bit weirded out, if there's three Batmen, but I don't see them really giving a crap as long as the movies are good

The issue is that there's a fair chance that there's been one very good Batman movie so far and the others have a realistic chance of being absolute dumpster fires

 

[Invader Joker]

I do think we're somewhat overthinking the casual audience's overall investment honestly.

Most people aren't gonna care enough to try and keep track of timelines and whatnot. They just watch whatever new movies come out with these comic book characters they've watched their whole lives. They might be a bit weirded out, if there's three Batmen, but I don't see them really giving a crap as long as the movies are good

The issue is that there's a fair chance that there's been one very good Batman movie so far and the others have a realistic chance of being absolute dumpster fires

I don't think it's about confusion, it's more about oversaturation and them getting tired of the character.

 

[Elayis]

Just a heads up for people who might not already have a copy, but The Batman's only $9.99 for Black Friday (both 4K & blu-ray); the sale's already live.

 

[The Lazarus Pit]

I don't think it's about confusion, it's more about oversaturation and them getting tired of the character.

Exactly. And I think it’s a very real concern, coming from a diehard Batman fan. Zaslav’s comments give me hope that they will streamline Batman content more.

If i had it my way, i would take multiple iterations and new films every other week if I could… but obviously that’s not sustainable and the audience would get tired

 

[DeadlyWest]

I don't think it's about confusion, it's more about oversaturation and them getting tired of the character.

But the issue there is it relies on the idea that even the majority of the audience is gonna watch every single movie, which is not the case. Keaton's only gonna likely attract an older audience (maybe). There's likely not gonna be much of a chance for oversaturation because they just...won't watch The Flash, or whatever other crossovers with Batman in them

 

[BatLobster]

Personally, I'm not sure how Battinson would work in any sort of more bright and colorful context-- which is what I think Justice League inherently calls for. Reeves' direction, Fraser's cinematography and Giacchino's score had every bit as much to do with bringing that character to life as Rob's performance. Not so easy to just pluck him out of all of that and throw him into a totally different type of tone. You can see how much of difference that kind of stuff all makes between Snyder's Batfleck stuff and Whedon's, regardless of what you think of either director's take. It's just an example of what *can* happen-- it can very easily go off the rails and undermine the credibility of the character. Jury is still out with how Keaton is going to come across in The Flash, but I'm hoping for the best.

I don't know, it's obviously WB's most prized IP and it makes total sense why they'd want to have a more unified brand around it, but I also just fundamentally disagree that the only trajectory of every Batman story is he has to eventually meet metas and battle aliens. It just feels less personal because you are steering the story away from Batman's relationships with his own supporting characters and rogues gallery, who are all tailor-made to highlight the psychological issues and themes that the character is steeped in. It seems like something that should only be explored only after you've told a complete, thorough story in Batman's world. And ideally, only if the same creative team WANTS to bridge that gap and tell that story, ala the Timmverse.

Still think the MCU has ruined us in that it's no longer enough to just enjoy a good solo series for what it is...if it's not connected to a larger universe you're doing something wrong. I just dislike that philosophy, even though it admittedly makes business sense given that the MCU is the most successful thing in entertainment and obviously anyone running DC has to look at that success and ask "why not us?". But it's still high risk/high reward. We literally saw DC shoot themselves in the foot with all of this once before, which is why they're still currently in this messy situation with a half-rebooted universe.

 

[AndrewGilkison]

I think the whole thing with Batman in the Justice League is that he is supposed to be the "human only guy in the scary costume" member of the team. The contrast with the other characters is why it works. If he looked like Superman or Wonder Woman, what would be the point of having him around? It would be like the Superfriends cartoon where all the heroes were interchangeable.

Any good superhero universe should be able to have something for everyone. The Batman movies can be dark and solo character focused, and the Justice League movies should be about these heroes interacting with each other and fighting threats that individually they can't win against. Ideally, we should be able to have both.

As for meta humans, there are a lot of great Batman villains who are meta humans. I would love to see GOOD versions of Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze in a Batman movie. I would love to see Clayface. Do we just want to keep making the same old Batman movies over and over again? I loved Nolan's trilogy, but he was clearly running out of ideas and steam by the time Rises came out, because he closed Batman off to the meta human characters (and took the Lazarus Pit away from Ra's) and we needed to reboot things over again. Maybe we would get fewer reboots if we weren't so rigid in what types of stories we allowed to be told in a Batman movie.

 

[Invader Joker]

I think that even if Reeves integrated The Batmanverse into the DCU, his grounded approach for the villains would not change at all.

 

[WayneMB]

Batman jumping between grounded-ish, murky noir gotham and DCU team-ups would be cool as hell. classic comicbook sh*t. don't know why someone would be against that. it's not like suddenly Reeves would lose creative freedom. and the more battinson the better.

 

[BatLobster]

I think the whole thing with Batman in the Justice League is that he is supposed to be the "human only guy in the scary costume" member of the team. The contrast with the other characters is why it works. If he looked like Superman or Wonder Woman, what would be the point of having him around? It would be like the Superfriends cartoon where all the heroes were interchangeable.

Any good superhero universe should be able to have something for everyone. The Batman movies can be dark and solo character focused, and the Justice League movies should be about these heroes interacting with each other and fighting threats that individually they can't win against. Ideally, we should be able to have both.

As for meta humans, there are a lot of great Batman villains who are meta humans. I would love to see GOOD versions of Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze in a Batman movie. I would love to see Clayface. Do we just want to keep making the same old Batman movies over and over again? I loved Nolan's trilogy, but he was clearly running out of ideas and steam by the time Rises came out, because he closed Batman off to the meta human characters (and took the Lazarus Pit away from Ra's) and we needed to reboot things over again. Maybe we would get fewer reboots if we weren't so rigid in what types of stories we allowed to be told in a Batman movie.

My comment about metas wasn't about his own rogues gallery, what I really was getting at were cosmic threats like Darkseid, etc. that JL stories delve into. I'm all for a more fantastical take on Batman at this point-- I'm just not sure that's what Reeves' version is shaping up to be. I'm guessing no based on The Batman. I'm just looking objectively at what Reeves did and asking myself if this particular version honestly seems like the best fit for a DCU with characters like Superman, Black Adam, Aquaman, Shazam ... I'm genuinely not sure is all. Yes, The Batman is more stylized, but it's stylized in an extremely precise and specific way where I'm not sure how that would work if you just chuck that Batman into another director's movie. Especially when the general tone of the other DCU films has trended more towards the "dumb/cooky fun" side of things. I think that's a fair question to raise and there are a lot of unknowns at this point about what that project would look like and who'd be making it.

I do think they should at least let Reeves finish his trilogy before even having any serious conversations about bringing Pattinson into the other movies. Let Keaton or Affleck be the DCU Batman for now. They can always sub one of them out for Pattinson down the line with some sort of timeline shenanigans if that's the route they want to go. But I think just throwing Pattinson into a team-up film while his own formative story is still underway feels dicey. Right now we are dealing with a Year Two, very rough around the edges Batman. Gotham is under water. So many villains yet to be encountered, no sign of a Bat-family yet. He couldn't stop The Riddler-- there's no reason to think this version of Batman is yet qualified to lead an elite team of the most powerful heroes in the world against extraplanetary threats. I see a lot of road between Battinson's journey in Gotham and whatever eventual Justice League team-up that happens.

 

[Kane52630]

 

[TheSmoothKnight]

 

[Brotherhood]

I quickly made this fan poster for the series...

 

[Luke995]

Pretty interesting.
The mother's plot reminds me the italian american gangster tradition, mostly Scorsese.

I'm also happy it will be a "family drama", I think we'll see a lot of freaks opposed to Falcone Family (yes, Alberto too).
Considering The godfather - Part II is my favourite movie and my love for Batman, that's a dream come true...

 

[Slick]

I quickly made this fan poster for the series...

Reminds me of this.

 

[Kane52630]

I just received my copy of The Batman score on vinyl from Mondo

 

[flickchick85]

I just received my copy of The Batman score on vinyl from Mondo

Meanwhile I’m still waiting on the poster I ordered from them back in March.

 

[Erik Lensherr]

 

[Invader Joker]

Except that looks awesome for a cosplay but terrible for a movie.

 

[emielaen]

I don't like when fans get the idea that there's "no excuse" not to do something in a film just bc they saw it somewhere else. Someone is crafting this stuff. There excuse can simply be that they don't wanna do it lol

and I think that's one of the better Freeze cosplays too