Why Matt Reeves Initially Said ‘No’ to The Batman and the DCEU

Bat meets Cat, Penguin, and Riddler with out an origin story in what we all know thus far about The Batman, which was stipulated by design to ensure that Matt Reeves to signal onto the movie. Robert Pattinson’s masked crusader is centered in his sophomore 12 months of crime preventing and encountering figures that may start to fill out his Rogues’ Gallery.

In an interview with Uproxx, Matt Reeves revealed that Warner Bros courted him whereas he thought he was the fallacious individual for the job. “The last thing that I felt I could do was to do a movie that was a standalone Batman movie, the first one in 10 years, that they also had to connect elsewhere. I thought it’s going to be enough just to do Batman in his world. So that was something that I said from the beginning was important to me: that I not have to do anything deliberately to connect it to other things.”

Despite his preliminary reluctance, Reeves finally met with WB and then-current Batman actor Ben Affleck to discover if he aligned with what they had been attempting to realize. “At that point, obviously, Ben Affleck was still doing the movie, and there was an iteration of it … I could see why they wanted to do it, but obviously it did connect to the broader world, to the broader DCEU. It was very action-oriented … it was like a James Bond kind of thing.”

And whereas that movie would have made sense for the area Affleck’s take occupied within the DCEU on the time, it wasn’t what Reeves had in thoughts. He defined, “I thought the meeting would be very short because I thought I would meet with them and say … ‘I can totally see why you would do this, but this isn’t the way that I would do it. I have to find some way in that feels personal to me or I wouldn’t know how to make it for you.’”

As time went on and plans started to vary with the ever-evolving DC slate of movies, Reeves discovered himself in ongoing conversations with WB about what he would do together with his tackle Batman. Citing neo-noir movies like The Zodiac and L.A. Confidential, Reeves defined he needed to drop in on Batman’s journey uncovering Gotham’s seedy underbelly by burgeoning crime lords, lone vigilantes, and connections they might have from the underside to the officers on the prime: “I didn’t want to do one of these stories where the Rogues’ Gallery characters come in and it’s really their story and Batman is a cipher because he’s already mastered himself. I wanted him to have an awakening. I wanted something that would rock him to his core.”

After the success of Todd Phillips’ The Joker and James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, you’ll be able to see why WB continued its pursuit of a extra Chinatown tackle Batman in Gotham versus a Year One-type origin story. “They did wait for me, and then they let me make this movie. This is the movie I wanted to make. Whatever people think of the movie, flaws and all, whatever it is, it’s not because there were edicts thrown down … [I wanted to] have [Batman] have a ways to go—have him have an arc so that he’s not quite figured it out, and have him have an awakening.”

Reeves’ imaginative and prescient—consider it as a whole comedian ebook run encapsulated into one three-hour film—clearly earned WB’s approval ultimately; The Batman arrives March 4.

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