“I’m starting to see I have had an effect here, but not the one I intended” monologues Robert Pattinsons‘s Bruce Wayne at the end of The Batman. Over shots of Batman carrying a child from the wreckage of the Riddler’s attack, Wayne describes a change in methods. “I have to become more. People need hope. To know someone’s out there for them.”
Bruce’s change in heart isn’t as a juicy lore tease, like the Joker reveal at the end of Batman Begins, but it’s no less delicious. We’ve just spent three hours with a dark and angry Bruce Wayne, one driven only by vengeance. What will he look like as a hero? How will he inspire hope?
Unfortunately, the wait for that answer has only grown longer, as writer/director Matt Reeves and writer Mattson Tomlin have only just recently completed the long-awaited script for The Batman Part II, which means filming won’t even begin until the end of this year at the earliest.
But that’s okay, because it just gives us more time to speculate! How do we want to see Bruce Wayne bring hope to Gotham City? What story threads do we want picked up and which ones should flap away into the night? What do we want from The Batman Part II?
Bruce Wayne, Gotham Playboy
One of the biggest changes that The Batman made to most stories about the Caped Crusader was its treatment of Bruce Wayne. In most stories, Bruce distracts from his Batman activities with a public persona as a galavanting playboy, a spoiled rich kid who no one would confuse for a brooding creature of the night. In The Batman, however, Bruce is almost a recluse, who only begrudgingly makes a public appearance for a funeral, and even then sulks the whole time.
It makes sense that Reeves would shy away from this take on Bruce Wayne. Wayne’s double life was such as key part of Christopher Nolan movies that Christian Bale was cast for his ability to play a charming socialite with a dark secret in American Psycho. Ignoring Wayne’s public persona helped Reeves distinguish his take.
Then again, Bruce was more reclusive in The Dark Knight Rises and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, so the time is right for a new version of this classic trope. Moreover, it would be fun to see Pattinson, a traditionally handsome man who has his own weirdo public persona, put a 21st century stamp on a rich kid. Would a spoiled rich kid buy banks on a whim and whisk away Russian ballet troupes, as did Ben Affleck and Bale’s Waynes? Or would Pattinson just get to be himself, wearing designer T-shirts and vaping in inappropriate places? Whatever it is, we want to see it!
More Emo Noir
The Batman showed Bruce gaining emotional maturity, so he should be a different person in The Batman Part II . That can include his adopting a carefree public persona, but he shouldn’t suddenly be well-adjusted. More importantly, he shouldn’t abandon the his brooding journaling from the first movie. The Batman‘s mix of hard-boiled narration and images of Bruce’s piercing, make-up stained eyes peering through locks of dark hair fully brought the noir tropes that birth the Batman into the 21st century.
More than anything else, that mixture of emotional vulnerability and biting purple prose made set The Batman apart from any other take. So as Part II finds Bruce trying to figure out how to be a different type of Batman, the voiceover will be essential, a way for him to air his grievances to the audience without betraying his various exteriors. And if it can be set to another Michael Giacchino reworking of a Nirvana classic, all the better.
Cool Commissioner Gordon
In the same way that Pattinson would make for a weird playboy Bruce, Jeffrey Wright would be interesting Commissioner Gordon. His Lieutenant Gordon made for one of the more delightful parts of The Batman. Wright played Gordon as a sardonic gumshoe, someone who knew that Batman made a great asset, but didn’t take the whole “creature of the night” thing too seriously. Moreover, Wright was willing to cross his fellow cops, recognizing that many of them were dirty.
So how does a guy like that run a department? The boring answer is just that he tamps down his eccentricities once he gets the big desk, but it’s hard to imagine Wright not overdoing it in even when playing a desk jockey.
Reeves has shown a willingness to diverge from established canon, but it’s hard to imagine that Gordon won’t become commissioner at some point. Let’s throw him into the job and see what Wright comes up with!
Sofia Gigante
Colin Farrell‘s scenery-chewing, prosthetic-assisted take on Oswald Cobblepott Oz Cobb was a delight in The Batman. But he proved too big to make the transition into the more grounded, Sopranos-inspired television show The Penguin. Fortunately, The Penguin had an ace up its sleeve with Cristin Milioti, who stole the spotlight as Carmine Falcone’s beleaguered daughter Sofia.
By the end of the series, Sofia had transitioned into a full supervillain in her own right, Sofia Gigante, an important part of the Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale comics that inspired The Batman. So it only makes sense that she would finally run into the Dark Knight in The Batman Part II.
Even more than the Penguin, Sofia Gigante represents the connection between gangsters such as her father and supervillains like the Riddler. She can gesture toward the more outlandish aspects of the Batman mythos, while still allowing Reeves and co. to stay in their relatively grounded world. Plus, we just want to see Milioti tear it up again as Sofia.
New Goofy Side Villain
That said, we do need another goofy side villain, and Sofia may not make sense that role. Of course, Part II can bring back Oz to irritate “Mr. Vengeance” once again. But it would also be nice to see Reeves pluck another character from Batman’s rogue’s gallery and let them be a larger-than-life part of the story.
While an established figure like Two-Face would make sense, as he’s close to Penguin’s stature in the canon and has no powers, it would be fun to see Reeves go deeper. Maybe the Ventriloquist and Scareface can be performing at one of the gangster’s clubs, needling Batman from the stage every time he comes in for information? Maybe former Russian agent KGBeast is bumbling around Gotham, making a mess for Batman to clean up. Heck, let’s get Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum in there somewhere, doubling the first movie’s number of heavy set loud guys.
New Big Bad
The Batman Part II will need a new major villain for Batman to fight. One would think that super-powered villains would be off the table, ruling out guys like Mr. Freeze or Man-Bat. But Reeves has shown he’s willing to redefine some characters, as when he made Riddler into a Jigsaw-style killer and with the odd Hugo Strange/Scarecrow riff on Dr. Julian Rush in The Penguin.
Given the debt The Batman owes to the Loeb and Sale comic The Long Halloween, Two-Face seems like an obvious example, even if his inclusion feels a bit derivative of The Dark Knight. A fun twist might involve Harvey Dent’s wife Gilda, who has her own murderous arc in The Long Halloween. It would be fun to see Poison Ivy as more of a sympathetic environmentalist crusader or to bring in Hush as another dark secret from the Waynes’ past. To that end, the Court of Owls would make sense for Part II, given the first movie’s emphasis on the hidden parts of Gotham City.
At the very least, the upcoming Mike Flanagan penned Clayface movie is purported to take place in The Batman universe, so maybe the shapshifter will be the next Batman baddie.
One thing we do know: do not bring back Barry Keoghan as the Joker. We’re sick of the scarred, twisted Jokers.
More Selina Kyle
Batman Returns may not be the best Batman movie, but it is the best movie with Batman in it. Part of the appeal comes from the electric chemistry between Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle. The Batman is the only movie to match that dynamic, as Pattinson and Zoe Kravitz transformed the flirty antagonists into doomed lovers, building to a heartbreaking parting of the ways.
For that reason alone, Kravitz should come back for Part II. Her return would complicate the second movie’s probable theme about Batman trying to bring hope instead of fear. Catwoman‘s quest for vengeance went further than even Batman at his angriest was willing to go. The contrast will only be greater when she returns to find the new, more hopeful Batman, but the longing between the two of them certainly has only grown. If Bruce got a more respectable girlfriend along the way, say a Silver St. Cloud or a Julie Madison, then we could have a classic noir love triangle, with Selina serving a femme fatale.
Of course, the story reasons for Selina’s return present a bit more of a challenge. Not only did her mission of vengeance against Carmine Falcone end with his death at the end of The Batman, but her half-sister Sofia destroyed the remains of the Falcone empire in The Penguin. Perhaps that is exactly what draws her back, giving us fun Sofia and Selena team-up?
No DC Connections
For the most part, we’ve been talking about what we do want to see in the next Batman. But, given the fact that The Batman 2 will come in the midst of the James Gunn’s reimagined (and hopefully successful) DC Universe, we do have to point out this restriction: The Batman Part II should not crossover into the larger DC Universe. No references to a kaiju attack in Metropolis. No Amanda Waller showing up to recruit Bruce. No knocking out Guy Gardner with one punch.
First of all, the beauty of The Batman movies have been the way they tell self-contained stories that reinvent well-known characters. We accept bold changes like Martha Wayne’s trouble past and Oswald Cobblepot’s new name because The Batman doesn’t feel like it’s setting rules for a larger shared universe. It’s telling its own story, on its own terms. To have Bruce enjoy a Big Belly Burger with a Justice Gang prize would be a compromise in those terms.
Moreover, it’s unnecessary. Gunn has made clear that The Batman exists in its own world, and that the mainline DC Universe will have its own Batman, already teased in Creature Commandos and to be fully revealed in the Andy Muschietti-directed The Brave and the Bold, featuring Batman and Robin. For decades, DC has had Elseworlds, One Shots, and Imaginary Stories about Batman that did not affect mainline continuity. The same can be true here.
The Batman Part II is currently slated for a 2027 release.
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