Robert Pattinson has watched the footage back. Whatever Matt Reeves is filming this time, it bears little resemblance to the picture the pair delivered in 2022.
“Matt just wrote this amazing script,” Pattinson said of his director and co-writer. “I think the first one was… it’s difficult to reinvent Batman as this new thing. And then to go in another totally different direction. I’m just looking at the playback on certain things… it looks different to the first one.”
From there, his enthusiasm only climbed.
“It’s just amazing. It’s a quite radical change of the script. It’s cool that Warner’s behind it, and DC. It’s just crazy. It’s a really radical retelling of Batman. I think people are going to be excited by it.”
The remarks surfaced in an interview filmed by MYmovies for TikTok, recorded while the actor is on the promo trail for his latest film, Primetime. He returns to the cowl in The Batman Part 2, dated February 18, 2028 — a release that, should the schedule stick, arrives just under six years on from the original.
What “radical” could actually mean
Nobody has the answer, and Pattinson offers no clues. The first film was a grim, grounded detective piece anchored by a brooding Bruce Wayne unravelling the Riddler’s scheme, and the natural assumption is that the follow-up stays in that neighbourhood. Yet “radical retelling” is carrying an enormous amount of weight, and the actor is being almost comically imprecise about it. A courtroom drama? Psychological horror? A musical? Given how badly Joker: Folie à Deux fared at the box office, scratch the musical.
A safer bet is that Reeves pushes further into the thriller machinery that drove the original, or tilts the story’s focus onto its villain. Exactly which villain remains an open question. Whether Marvel star Sebastian Stan is suiting up as Harvey Dent / Two-Face, as many expect, has yet to be confirmed — and even if he is, nothing establishes him as the primary antagonist.
The fights are winning
Pattinson has copped to one tangible detail: the action sequences take more out of him now that he’s in his 40s.
“I’m definitely feeling my age when fighting a lot,” Pattinson told GQ. “I’m literally like, ‘Goddamn, this is significantly harder than it used to be.’ But it’s really fun. And I think the movie’s going to be pretty great. It’s got a really, really fun cast, but it’s a marathon.”
Colin Farrell read the whole thing. He’s in two scenes.
Farrell reprises his role as the crime boss, and he’s perfectly happy to admit how modest that commitment is. Speaking to ScreenRant in June, he confirmed he’d gone through the script from end to end.
“I got to read from the first to last page and it’s really magnificent,” he said. “I just think Matt Reeves is brilliant and he wrote, not only tonally, a really kind of dark and at times terrifying piece, and not only psychologically weighty and nuanced, but really feeling. It’s a really… There’s moments in it. It’s full of feeling. I just think he wrote kind of a contemporary genre masterpiece, really. I’m only in two scenes, which is great because it means I can enjoy the rest of the film.”
This is not the DC Universe. Keep that straight.
Reeves’ Batman movies exist apart from the running DC Universe, meaning they occupy no shared continuity with Superman, Supergirl, Lanterns or Man of Tomorrow next year. The Batman and its HBO offshoot The Penguin instead fall under the banner of The Batman Epic Crime Saga. In James Gunn’s rebooted DCU, the cape will pass to an entirely different actor whenever The Brave and the Bold gets underway.
That puts Pattinson in a rare position: a Batman who doesn’t need to line up with anything else. Reeves is free to make the odd film — and, if Pattinson is to be believed, Warner is allowing exactly that.
“It’s just crazy,” he said. It’s a phrase he’s repeating a lot lately.