Major spoilers for The Batman follow from this point on, so don’t say you haven’t been warned.
While plenty of fans love going into the theater on opening day knowing hardly anything about a movie, there’s also a huge number of people who actively seek to uncover as much information as possible ahead of release. Luckily, The Batman director Matt Reeves has been doing his best to throw them off the scent.
When Eternals star Barry Keoghan was first announced for the cast, he was listed as Gotham City cop Stanley Merkel, an established character in comic book canon. However, the closer we got to release, the more we began to hear recurring rumors that he may have actually been hired as the latest version of the Joker.
To be fair, all we see of Keoghan in The Batman is part of his face so there’s no such thing as an official confirmation, but it’s not as if the maniacal laughing fit he shares with Paul Dano’s Riddler belongs to anybody else, especially after all of the speculation. In a recent interview with IGN, Reeves admitted that he purposely spread disinformation and even shot fake scenes to try and avoid spoilers leaking out.
“When you’re making a movie like this, you want it to be different, you want people to feel like they’re having a special experience. And then for me, when you’re going to the cinema you want some level of surprise. I think one of the things I was worried about was speculation while we were making the movie, that we would be exploring the character that we ended up exploring. So we started thinking what we could do to throw people off that scent. This idea of making him Stanley Merkel was exactly that, because the police force is actually a big part of the story so it seemed credible that we could be doing that.”
He didn’t really do a great job if we’re being honest, but there’s still plenty of people set to check out The Batman that might not even know Keoghan is even part of the ensemble, never mind the heavy-handed hint that we’re going to see him slap on the makeup to do battle with Robert Pattinson’s Caped Crusader as the Clown Prince of Crime in the inevitable sequels.
