Matt Reeves’ The Batman defied odds and expectations by delivering a post-Christopher Nolan Batman movie everyone could get behind. Buoyed by the equally unlikely casting of Robert Pattinson under the iconic cowl, Warner Bros. Discovery’s most recent crack at The Dark Knight on screen spoiled fans with what they’d long been starving for: a detective story, a Batman: Year One-inspired Catwoman, a Gotham City teeming with rogues. It’s no wonder then that those very fans The Batman won over loudly bemoaned the seemingly perpetually delayed The Batman: Part II.
There was The Penguin, the Colin Farrell and Cristina Milioti-led spin-off that kept fans satiated for a little while. But folks eager for The Batman: Part II planning to whet appetites with a rewatch of The Batman may want to tread lightly. The first entry in what’s described as both a DCU Elseworld and a “Batman Crime Saga” project still holds up, but several crude awakenings await, too. Brace yourself for all the plot misfires, miscasts and meta-textual migraines that might pop up below.
The Batman is Just Se7en in The Dark Knight’s Clothing — And That’s a Huge Problem
Robert Pattinson stars as Bruce Wayne in The Batman
Matt Reeves’ The Batman wears its influences on its leathery, spiked gauntlet sleeve. The fingerprints of David Fincher’s Se7en are everywhere: the monotone-voiced serial killer, the rain-soaked voyeurism. It’s one thing to tip the proverbial cap to the classic detective drama’s aesthetic—to render a superhero film fluent in the noir language. But it’s another thing to deliver “Se7en, but with Batman.” The more rewatches one clocks, the more The Batman can feel like an elevator pitch.
Besides, superhero movies have relied on the credibility of their more respectable predecessors in the film canon instead of carving their own niche out for themselves. Joker? “Taxi Driver with clown paint.” Logan is “Unforgiven with claws.” The Batman followed suit, delivering Se7en with comic-book characters instead of Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. The film nails it in channeling Fincher’s ethos, but one can’t help but wonder what it would look like if it graduated beyond inspiration and imitation.
The Batman Crime Saga Needed Its Spin-Offs
Macall Polay / ©HBO / Courtesy Everett Collection
The Batman deliberately introduced a Gotham City overpopulated with characters begging for stories. And for a moment? It looked like that would actually happen. After Reeves’ successful trip to Gotham was released in theaters, a suite of companion projects was announced shortly thereafter: The Penguin, a GCPD drama and a horror-leaning Arkham series among them. Of those, only The Penguin saw the light of day, and it thrived. Farrell’s performance turned the spinoff into appointment television; Cristina Milioti’s surprise performance as Sofia Falcone made it an event.
Yet, despite the ballyhoo, the rest never materialized. And they never will. The Gotham PD series quietly disappeared. The Arkham show evaporated. All likely casulties to James Gunn’s larger DCU plans. Gunn didn’t confirm his vision was the issue, but he confirmed the project’s cancellation in a 2025 interview with YouTuber BobaTalks, saying, “That isn’t something that is being developed by anyone right now. It just didn’t work.” It all but confirms the suspicion that the DCU’s reset created a fissure in Reeves’ carefully mapped “Batman Crime Saga.”
The Joker is the Worst Part of The Batman
In a nearly three-hour movie of carefully plotted mystery, The Batman makes an egregious mistake in rolling out a Joker cameo right at the buzzer. Played by Barry Keoghan, The Batman includes a less-than-titillating tease of a Riddler-Joker team-up amid its exhale, landing like a disorienting gut punch of an otherwise airtight conclusion.Worse yet was the additional scene released exclusively online, with Pattinson’s Batman interrogating Keoghans’ Joker at Arkham. There, audiences get Reeves’ rendition of The Clown Prince of Crime: a diminutive whiner hidden behind bad lighting and a metric ton of prosthetics that turns every Joker line into mush. The deleted scene was supposed to ignite excitement for future installments, but it, along with the Riddler and Joker vignette, only oversaturated The Batman story and Reeves’ world.
Three Hours of The Batman is A Lot to Chew On
Image via Warner Bros.
The Joker of it all doesn’t help The Batman’s bloat, either. The Batman clocks in at two hours and 56 minutes. On opening night in theaters, that runtime felt earned—a moody, slow-burning detective story that needed space to breathe. Sitting at home on a rewatch, feeling jaded, awakened to its derivative nature—it can feel like a slog. The film’s deliberately paced, to be sure. It hits best in a darkened theater, or perhaps around the film’s Halloween setting. It’s a tougher sell on Blu-ray or a tablet.
The Batman essentially has two endings—the Riddler’s capture, then the flood sequence takes over a half hour of additional run time. Once that’s resolved and the Joker tease happens, it’s crazy-making enough to put an audience member in Arkham Asylum right alongside them. Batman’s character arc in the film, evolving from his single-track-minded pursuit as “Vengeance” into Gotham’s beacon of hope, is quite an evolved take on the character. His rooftop rescue as the sun rises over Gotham City is a simple, streamlined image. But there’s so much filler in and around it, it’s totally possible the nuanced journey gets lost on the bulk of The Batman’s audience.
Robert Pattinson’s Batman is a Great Detective, is Bad at Basically Everything Else
Matt Reeves finally gave fans a facet of The Batman they’d been begging for: “The World’s Greatest Detective.” Robert Pattinson’s version of the vigilante decodes riddles, dusts for prints, cracks clues—he’s a true forensics obsessive. For any long time fan of the character, it’s satisfying to witness such a cerebral Batman. What’s less satisfying, though is how this brilliance seemingly ciphons away his skills in every other category.
As Bruce Wayne, he’s socially inept to the point of parody a little too heavy-handed on the Kurt Cobain inspiration. He’s so agorophobic he might as well be Solomon Grundy. As far as his Wayne Enterprises business brilliance goes, he’s non-existent. Even when suited as The Dark Knight, he’s far from composed. The infamous GCPD escape sequence plays like a highlight reel of rookie mistakes: the panicked sprint up the tower, the premature glider deployment, the face-first collision with the city’s underpass ending with him eating pavement—it’s all less than graceful.
Reeves wants us to see a young Batman still figuring it out—a noir antihero bleeding for his city. But rewatching now, it feels more like someone bad at their life’s work.
Bruce Wayne is the Meanest (Non-Villain) Character in the Movie
Image via Warner Bros.
The Batman does a great job fleshing out backstories and making sure everyone is empathetic: The Riddler is an orphan failed by Gotham’s corruption. Selina is Falcone’s bastard child. Penguin is a scrappy survivor, whose story gets more fully realized in his spinoff series. There’s just one glaring omission: Bruce Wayne. Like the aforementioned, Bruce is also failed by the system, but he comes off as the most petty, the most cynical and closed off of the bunch despite having the most resources—and love (from Alfred).
The cruelty lands hardest during The Batman’s hospital scene, after Alfred’s near-death. The famous comic book butler wakes from almost being killed in a bombing, burnt and bandaged. Andy Serkis delivers a heartbreaking, tearful apology and confession regarding Bruce’s family history. What’s Bruce’s first response? Not concern, gratitude or affection—just brutal accusatory flames being fanned. It’s one of the most emotionally complex and effective moments of the movie, yes, but one so jarring it nearly redefines the Wayne character.
Catwoman & Batman’s Romance Needed More Attention
Image via Warner Bros.
Zoë Kravitz’s Selina Kyle promised the Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale-inspired dynamic fans craved. The leather. The attitude. The sex appeal. But the actual relationship between Bruce and Selina left a lot to be desired, only flirting—literally—with its true potential. The Bat and the Cat encounter one another once or twice, then team up an equal amount. Suddenly, The Batman ends and asks audiences to feel devastated when Catwoman leaves Gotham and parts ways with Bruce. The problem is: Reeves never gave them enough emotional heftiness or a true trauma bond to justify that heartbreak.
Compare this to Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Keaton in Batman Returns—the twisted dance between those two depictions felt electric because Tim Burton actually developed it. Or even Anne Hathaway and Christian Bale’s dynamic, which left things unsaid only to allude to their getaway at the end as the time their bond truly began. Pattinson and Kravitz have chemistry, sure, but chemistry isn’t a substitute for actual relationship development.
The Wait Between The Batman and The Batman: Part II Was Way Too Long
The Batman dropped back in March 2022. The Batman: Part II is due around October 2026. That’s a four-and-a-half-year gap after a film that ended on a cliffhanger. Gotham faced a terror attack disaster; Batman stepped into a new symbolic role. The ending promised continuation, but by the time The Batman Part II is earmarked to arrive, the cultural moment might have passed. Not only will the demographic of fans who were rabid for The Batman in 2022 have gotten older, Batman himself, Robert Pattinson, will be 40+, forced to play a “young” version of The Dark Knight, apparently only in his second year.
“I fucking hope [we’ll start shooting The Batman II] soon,” Pattinson said when Variety asked the actor about the many delays the project has faced. “I started out as young Batman and I’m going to be fucking old Batman by the sequel… I’m 38, I’m old.” Cristina Milioti’s Emmy Award-winning turn as Sofia Falcone in The Penguin renewed some interest in Reeves’ The Batman universe. But there is no guarantee that the character will even appear in the sequel. Even if she does appear, she’ll likely be a featured player, not the main event. Eventually, people stop caring about the central story when you make them wait too long for a payoff.
Matt Reeves Repeats Christopher Nolan’s Biggest Mistake in The Batman
The Batman, like The Dark Knight Trilogy, tries to have it both ways. It angles itself towards the prestige category. It’s a serious, elevated affair, starring Oscar nominees, inspired by classic crime dramas, dressed in DC Comics costumes. It’s a familiar cocktail, but by serving such a blend to audiences, they yet again get skimped of the stuff they’ve been held out from for decades—a true comic book-y Batman. The Riddler appears, but he’s basically a Zodiac-style serial killer in a gimp mask, not a question-mark-clad, quizzical crazy person. There’s no Clayface, no Mr. Freeze, no Poison Ivy—none of the weird, wonderful villains that make Batman who he is.
It’s not that Reeves and company don’t do a wonderful job bringing Catwoman, The Penguin and The Riddler to life—they do; it’s that fans had just spent the bones of a decade dealing with identical creative choices from Christopher Nolan. Those decisions hamstrung his trilogy, too. His depictions of villains like Ra’s al Ghul, Bane and Scarecrow were all stripped of the supernatural-tinged elements that make them special on the comic book page. Reeves all but assured another franchise of the same problems.
The DCU Distraction Is Too Much: Did James Gunn’s Vision Make The Batman Unwatchable?
Superman, Krypto, Joey and Metamorpho in front of a black hole in an anti-proton river in Superman 2025Image via DC Studios
Here’s the metatextual headache: The Batman exists in a weird limbo between being its own thing and, since its release, being overshadowed by James Gunn’s emerging—and larger—DC universe. Shortly after its March 2022 release, James Gunn and Peter Safran took over DC Studios and announced their grand plan for a rebooted DCU, including the Robert Pattinson-less Batman: The Brave and The Bold. Gunn even strapped The Batman with the retroactively labeled title of “Elseworld”—placing Reeves’ projects in a separate continuity that wouldn’t connect to Gunn’s Superman or any other stories in the mainline DCU. The result? An incessant hum that distracts during every The Batman rewatch.
For casual fans, this is exhausting. Warner Bros.-Discovery can’t seem to decide what The Batman actually is. Watching it in 2025 means confronting the reality that this Batman—one of the all-time best adaptations—is forced to exist in a silo, disconnected from any larger universe, with no plans to interact with Superman, Lanterns, or anyone else. That’s fine if you wanted a standalone Batman story. It’s less fine if you were hoping this would be the Batman going forward.
- Release Date
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March 4, 2022
- Runtime
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176 minutes
- Director
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Matt Reeves
- Writers
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Matt Reeves, Peter Craig, Bob Kane, Bill Finger
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Robert Pattinson
Bruce Wayne / The Batman
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