It sounds obvious when you hear that a title character is going to be in almost every scene of the movie bearing their name, but that hasn’t always been the case in the superhero genre.
Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3, Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice are just a few of the comic book adaptations to have spent large swathes of the running time sidelining the figure taking top billing, but Matt Reeves won’t be making that mistake with The Batman.
Even though the latest reboot for the Caped Crusader is telling the origin stories of Catwoman, the Riddler, and the Penguin within the span of a near three-hour running time, the director revealed during a press event (via CBR) that the focus always remains on Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne, as well as his costumed alter ego.
“What happened was I wanted the arc to be Batman’s, and I was like wow, there are a lot of … which, by the way, you don’t generally have a lot of long dialogue scenes in these Batman movies with Batman in the cowl, wearing the cape, and in emotional scenes, the scenes of seeing him rocked, half of his face is covered.
Now, it was the intention. Of course, the point was to make his emotions be visible through the cowl. We had no idea how hard it was going to be. I mean, there were times when I would come to Rob and go, ‘Okay, great. I just need to feel a little more.’ He’d be like, ‘More? What?’ Yeah, he was about to burst a vein.”
The Batman takes place during Bruce’s second year protecting the streets of Gotham, so we hopefully won’t get bogged down seeing Thomas and Martha Wayne gunned down for the umpteenth time, but it sounds as though the narrative and thematic burden will be shouldered largely by our intrepid protagonist, despite everything else unfolding around him.
