When Matt Reeves’ The Batman finally hits the big screen in March of next year, unless it ends up being delayed to the historically more lucrative summer months as has been rumored, it’ll put the final exclamation point on a project that’s suffered from a huge amount of behind the scenes issues since it was first announced in 2014.
Ben Affleck was originally set to star, direct and co-write, with his grizzled Caped Crusader facing off against Joe Manganiello’s Deathstroke, but when he dropped out of the director’s chair and essentially lost all interest in being the DCEU’s resident nocturnal vigilante, Reeves stepped in to rework the project from the ground up.
Robert Pattinson was then cast, before The Batman faced some major problems of its own after enduring multiple shutdowns as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic that led to production finally calling it a wrap fourteen months after cameras had started rolling. There’s now less than a year to go until release, and up until recently, all we thought we knew for sure is that the reboot wouldn’t be part of the DCEU’s continuity.
However, tipster Mikey Sutton is reporting that Pattinson’s Dark Knight could end up joining the rebooted Justice League in the future, with the next iteration of the all-star team set to draw their members from all across Warner Bros. and DC Films’ multiverse.
“Ben Affleck’s Batman is going to be replaced by Robert Pattinson’s Dark Knight from a different Earth,” says Sutton.
Of course, Reeves is apparently pretty adamant that The Batman won’t be boxed in as part of a shared universe to allow him to retain full creative control, but the studio have repeatedly failed to settle on a unified approach to their comic book output in the past, so it wouldn’t be a shock if the goalposts moved yet again.
