It’s fair to say that the release of the first trailer for The Batman has the internet excited today, from the reveal of a decidedly emo Bruce Wayne to the foreboding tone of the material. The teaser, which you can catch above, appears to contain several nods to the villains we’ll be seeing in Matt Reeves’ film, too, including Paul Dano’s Riddler. Many people are suggesting, though, that Colin Farrell shows up as Oswald Cobblepot in the footage as well, albeit not quite in the way that we expected.
According to ScreenRant, a glimpse of a rain-soaked character may actually be Farrell wearing heavy make-up. Given that we’ve already had behind-the-scenes images of the actor looking very different, it’s initially hard to give this idea too much credit. However, the theory also suggests that you can pick out aspects of Farrell’s face structure in the character, while other angles showing him driving away do indeed indicate the hooked nose of the Penguin.
As the trailer does give us decent glimpses of Zoë Kravitz’s Catwoman and Jeffrey Wright’s Jim Gordon, it would be strange not to at least get some of Farrell’s Cobblepot. The decision to have the actor play the role in prosthetics may also be setting up some kind of future transformation into what we received in earlier photos from the set, or might just be what was planned all along. Of course, there’s still a lot of filming left to be done on The Batman, so we’ll likely receive more comprehensive details on the Penguin as new material becomes available.
For now, we’d say there’s a solid chance that the man who presumably calls Batman “crazy” is Farrell’s Penguin, and if so, it’ll be fascinating to see what the actor can bring to the part from underneath all that makeup. In any case, this and other hints from the trailer certainly give us a lot to chew over as we wait for more information on The Batman, which sadly won’t be out in theaters until October 2021.
