After young Bruce Wayne sees his parents gunned down in front of his very eyes, he manifests the trauma of feeling personally responsible for their deaths by funneling his vast inheritance into confronting his fear of bats by dressing up as one to batter the criminal underworld of Gotham City to a pulp with his bare hands, spending untold millions on gadgets, vehicles and other expenses to get the job done.
In short, Batman is clearly a very psychologically troubled and damaged figure, that some might even call borderline psychotic. He’s not the sort of superhero that should be handled with kid gloves, then, as Joel Schumacher infamously proved, so it might be good news that insider Grace Randolph offers that she’s heard Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson’s reboot is extremely dark, as you can see below.
I haven't heard anything about WB execs having problem re #TheBatman
I DID hear from several people film is EXTREMELY dark, & there's SOME concern re mainstream appeal
but #Joker made over a billion $.
Let's hope WB sticks to their guns this time.
It's apparently 🔥🔥🔥🔥 https://t.co/u3Lk34vmvz— Grace Randolph (@GraceRandolph) June 4, 2021
This shouldn’t come as a surprise when Paul Dano’s Riddler has been revealed as a cross between the Zodiac Killer and an S&M enthusiast, while Pattinson certainly had the brooding thing down pat in the first trailer, and that’s without mentioning the final moments that saw him turn a low-level criminal’s face into absolute mincemeat.
It’ll be interesting to discover the tone of the finished product when The Batman premieres next March, because there’s certainly a balance to be struck between adhering to Caped Crusader’s standard set of traits and still making him the star of a crowd-pleasing blockbuster. Warner Bros. may have hated Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but so far, we’ve yet to hear any tales of Reeves being subjected to heavy-handed interference on the studio’s part, which is encouraging given WB’s predilection for getting too involved in their comic book epics.
