Now that we know what Batman will look like in The Batman,and how Robert Pattinson‘s jawline will fill out the cowl, one of the big things that keeps coming up on social media is the idea that the mask seems to be an homage to the one worn by Adam West on the ’60s Batman TV show. That series was largely responsible for catapulting Batman into the minds of people who didn’t read comic books, but also resulted in a change to the comics later, when the campy style of the Show had started to grate on comics readers and the then-popular look, which mirrored what the TV producers had done.
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The result was a complete rejection of camp and an appropriation of darkness and violence that has defined the character more or less since, with Neal Adams’s Dark Knight redesign defining Batman for the comics and Tim Burton’s movie shaping the character in the public imagination. And now, it looks like Pattinson will be the first live-action Batman since West to wear a mask that has stitching visible on the face.
Like West, it appears as though the back of the cowl is more or less one piece (likely, for the sake of this movie, lined with padding and kevlar or something like that), with some designwork and stitching on the front of the face, which looks more like leather rather than the heavy-duty plastic fans are used to seeing in many of these films.
Like the West mask, the Pattinson mask seems to have a line of stiching that starts at the neck and connects the front piece of the mask to the rear; it also has stitching around the nose (although here it looks more reinforced and protective than it did in the West version, where it was more decorative). It also has a very pronounced eyebrow ridge that follows rougly the same line as the eyebrows painted on the West mask.
If one were so inclined , you could even argue that the secondary stitching that runs from the ridge of the eyebrow and up out of the shot in the Pattinson costume could easily be a variation on the ridge of black that played over the front of the face on the blue Adam West mask.
Of course, a lot of this is in the eye of the beholder, and we will have to wait until a little further into the production phase to hear from designers and filmmakers as to whether or not this was at all intentional, but for now feel free to go on Twitter, where everyone basically agrees that this costume looks like Arkham Knight and Batman ’66 had a baby.
The Batman is set to premiere in theaters on June 25, 2021.
What do you think of Pattinson’s look as the Caped Crusader? Be sure to let us know in the comments!
