Originally scheduled for 2025, The Batman Part II isn’t due until 2027. We look at its delays, and why it could still be relevant in two years’ time.
The shoot of The Batman was beset by disease and tragedy. Just as the UK production on director and co-writer Matt Reeves’ superhero thriller began in January 2020, the pandemic began to sweep across the globe. Reeves and his collaborators battled on through delays, illnesses, and social distancing rules; most sadly, its dialect coach, Andrew Jack, passed away from complications related to Covid that March.
Months later, leading man Robert Pattinson also contracted the virus, prompting another pause in filming. “All we did was shoot a day,” Reeves told Variety a couple of years later, “and Batman got Covid.”
In fact, Reeves became so wary of getting Covid – and causing potentially ruinous delays to the production – that he wore a cobbled-together costume of his own (scuba diving goggles, mask, head covering) to avoid catching it. “You couldn’t see my face, and this is the way the actors saw me for the rest of the movie,” Reeves said. “I was like this ridiculous, hermetically sealed creature. It was absurd.”
The production’s battle with sickness and uncertainty may have informed The Batman itself: released three years ago this month, it’s perhaps one of the most boldly mournful comic book movies ever made. Drawing as much from 70s thrillers, true crime and 90s grunge music as its superhero source material, it’s a three-hour detective thriller largely focusing on one grimy district in Gotham City and the crime which ravages it.
Pattinson’s take on Bruce Wayne is wan and haunted; rather than rehash the death of his parents yet again, Reeves instead lets the grief play out on the actor’s pallid features. His antagonists are a mixture of hoodlums straight out of a pre-code gangster flick, with an unrecognisable Colin Farrell playing the Penguin as a dodgy nightclub owner. Similarly, Paul Dano’s Riddler isn’t an ingenious supervillain so much as a sociopathic incel with an army of online acolytes.
Uncompromising though it was, The Batman was a qualified success for Warner Bros. Its $772m box office didn’t reach the heights of Christopher Nolan’s last two Dark Knight movies or even Zack Snyder’s Batman V Superman, but then, cinemas were still reeling from the fallout from the pandemic and an audience more difficult to coax out of their homes and back into theatres.
A sequel was announced within weeks of The Batman’s release, with the plan being to make a trilogy around Pattinson’s Caped Crusader and a separate TV series, The Penguin, with Colin Farrell returning to play the titular villain. Since 2022, however, Reeves hasn’t exactly rushed to get a direct film sequel into production. Initially, there were reports that we’d see The Batman Part II, as it was later named, in October 2025, with production set to begin in August 2024.
By March 2024, however, it was announced that The Batman Part II was to be delayed until October 2026 – a setback said to have been caused by the writer’s strikes that had disrupted productions all over Hollywood. At the time of writing, the sequel is now expected to emerge in October 2027, with filming said to be planned for late 2025. Pattinson, Farrell, Andy Serkis (who played an ex-military Alfred Pennyworth in the last film), Zoe Kravitz (Catwoman) and Jeffrey Wright (Jim Gordon) are set to return.
All of which means that, should cameras start rolling in the autumn, it’ll be almost six years after shooting began on the first film in 2020. The delays have been such that James Gunn, now head of DC Studios and overseer of a universe of films separate from Reeves’ Batman, insisted last November that the sequel hadn’t been cancelled.
Robert Pattinson himself seems to be getting a little impatient. In an interview for Hero magazine, fellow actor Naomi Ackie asked Pattinson about the status of the next Batman and whether it was going to shoot soon. Pattinson replied, “I fucking hope so. I started out as a young Batman and I’m going to be fucking old Batman by the sequel.”
Although Pattinson was making a light-hearted remark, it’s also a valid point. The Batman depicted the Caped Crusader at the start of his crime-fighting career, with none of the gadgets typically associated with the character. His prowess in combat was still unpolished; he hadn’t yet mastered the art of the soft landing; his Batmobile was essentially a big, all-American muscle car.
With such a long gap between sequels, there’s the potential that Reeves will write the time lapse into his screenplay, with the story reconnecting with an older, more experienced Batman. It’s a temporal leap we’ve seen in movies before, both within the Batman franchise and elsewhere. Bruce Wayne and his masked alter ego were still vital and filled with fighting spirit in 2008’s The Dark Knight; by the time of The Dark Knight Rises, released four years later, Christian Bale’s version of Batman was reclusive, beaten down and exhausted – and that was before he got into a tussle with Tom Hardy’s formidable Bane.
The Daniel Craig-era James Bond movies – which have much in common with Batman – followed a similar pattern. Casino Royale (2006) and Quantum Of Solace (2008) introduced a new, younger Bond, having just earned his 007 licence and only just coming into his own as a spy. The great expanse that sat between Quantum and 2012’s Skyfall, however, essentially robbed us of more adventures that followed 007 as an unfinished article. The Bond of Skyfall is older, grouchier and struggles to shoot straight following a mission gone awry, and Craig continued the same embittered, nearing-retirement tone into Spectre (2015) and his 2022 swansong, No Time To Die.
For this writer, at least, it’d be a pity if Reeves felt compelled to skip years of Bruce Wayne’s progress as the Caped Crusader. It’d be fascinating to see more of his transformation – his growing confidence in combat, his development of gadgets, the construction of the Batcave. But then again, Wayne’s relative youth only formed part of what made The Batman what it was; it was also a story about crime as a disease that plagued the economically deprived areas of Gotham.
In this regard, Reeves appears to have plenty more to say on this particular subject.
Talking to SFX magazine as The Penguin TV series emerged, he said that the show and his forthcoming film sequel were “a meditation on why Gotham is the way it is.”
The Batman Part II will, he said, “dig into the epic story about deeper corruption, and it goes into places that [Batman] 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.”
Much time has already passed since 2020, and already the pandemic, the bereavements, the separation and fear it brought about feel like a nightmare that is thankfully beginning to fade from memory.
James Gunn’s Superman, due out in July, also appears to be about to introduce a colourful, optimistic take on the superhero that is markedly different from Zack Snyder’s grimdark Man Of Steel from 2014. If successful, it will likely set the tempo for a universe of planned DC films with a similar pop art tone.
This might beg the question: will audiences be in the mood for another downbeat Batman film in 2027? While we don’t own a crystal ball, it only takes a quick look at recent headlines to see that, while the pandemic’s behind us, the world is still in a dark, deeply uncertain place. Wars, economic uncertainty, a tech billionaire going through US government departments with a hatchet; a President seemingly bent on starting trade wars with decades-long allies and cosying up to despots overseas.
Meanwhile, social inequality has only increased since the pandemic; if Gotham were a real-world city, its poorest would be worse off today than they would have been in 2020. And as The Batman explored, crime, corruption and chaos inevitably spring from a disparity in wealth. Despite all his privilege as a billionaire, Pattinson’s Batman comes to realise this himself, and at the end of Reeves’ film, he vows to try to change Gotham for the better, irrespective of the personal cost.
A wealthy yet altruistic hero who aims to root out corruption and actually change the world for the better, rather than merely enrich himself? Despite the delays, The Batman Part II could still offer a cathartic alternative to our increasingly depressing reality.
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