Gotham City belonged to Matt Reeves. In 2017, news broke that the director of Cloverfield and War for the Planet of the Apes was going to make the next Batman movie. Only he wasn’t going to be beholden to any previous iteration. Reeves had his own ideas for Batman and his cast of equally famous villains. And so the long, long road to the March 4 release of The Batman began with a blank page, blinking cursor, and 80 years of source material at his disposal.
Quickly Reeves had a few very core ideas. This wouldn’t be Batman origin story, but would take place early in his tenure as the hero. Famous villains like the Riddler, Penguin, and Catwoman would be along for the ride. And Reeves really wanted to make a movie where Batman could live up to his famous title “The World’s Greatest Detective.”
Speaking at a recent press event, Gizmodo asked Reeves about this process. Specifically how did he choose which villains to use, what order did they come in, and where did he choose to stop? We’ll let Reeves take over.
“I knew I didn’t want to do an origin story,” Reeves began. “And I knew that I wanted to do a story that leaned into the detective side of Batman because we hadn’t seen it where it was really in the forefront of the story. And so when I started thinking about that, I knew what was important to me was that Batman have the arc of the story … Because a lot of times, once he’s already Batman, he no longer has the arc, per se. You might have Rogues’ Gallery characters come in, they have the grand story, and the Batman is going to battle them in some way. And I wanted to do a Batman story where he was already Batman, but he still was in early days and had to find a way to really evolve. And I wanted to do the story that the investigation of this particular mystery would lead him back to something very personal and would rock him to his core.”
“So knowing that I want to do that kind of thing, I started sort of thinking about … Long Halloween,” Reeves continues. “I was thinking about the Calendar Man and the idea of the different sort of killings. And then this idea came to me. I thought, ‘Well, you know, we could do a thing where at these crimes there’s correspondence left for the Batman.’ The whole idea of being Batman is your power is in being anonymous. So the idea that suddenly someone is shining a light on you, that that would be very unsettling to him. I thought ‘That’s a great way in.’ And as I started thinking about that and trying to ground it, I thought about the Zodiac. I thought about how the Zodiac, in this horrific way, left all of this sort of disturbing ciphers and communications to the police and to the newspapers and how unsettling that was. And I thought, ‘Wow, that actually sounds like a horrifying version of the Riddler because he was leaving all these puzzles.’ So the Riddler was part of the conception very early on in trying to figure out which of the Rogues’ Gallery characters would communicate in that way with Batman. And so that happened right away.”
So Reeves entire pitch centered on the Riddler. His riddles, his games, his knowledge about Batman and his past. What was next? Reeves continued.
“I thought it would be interesting that as you followed the details of the crime that would take him across the paths of these other characters,” the co-writer and director said. “I knew right away that I wanted Selena Kyle to be in the story. But I thought ‘Well, gee maybe there’s a way that we go searching for this person who was seen with the mayor. And that takes us to the Iceberg Lounge, and that’s a version of the Penguin you’ve never seen and that could get us into the mafia story and that would get us into [Carmine] Falcone and, of course, I thought of other stuff.” Basically once Reeves’ wild imagination found the end of his story, that’s when the characters stopped being peppered in. But before that, it was almost a roadmap marked by Batman villains before they’re fully formed villains.
“So it’s this whole thing where you do a deep dive and everything becomes like a blender. The number of comics that I read just to begin, and then watching sort of a bunch of stuff and reading Mindhunter and learning about profiling serial killers. So that’s kind of what led to it. Riddler was first and then thinking about the path of how we could cross these kind of iconic characters but in versions you hadn’t seen and versions that weren’t yet the versions that we know. That was sort of the concept.”
“This isn’t a Batman origin story,” Reeves summed it up. “But it is the origin story of every Rogues’ Gallery character that you come across.”
Which, of course, sounds awesome. Except that this is just one movie. Will we ever get to see more than the origin of these characters? “What we’re really trying to do is to launch this world and if the world embraces this we have a lot of good ideas,” Reeves said.
The Batman opens March 3. We’ll have more soon.