The Batman Director Matt Reeves Explains Why He’s Not Making an Origin Movie

Filmmaker Matt Reeves is taking on the responsibiity of revitalizing the Batman film franchise after the failure of Justice League, and one of the first things audiences learned is that while The Batman will be set early in Bruce Wayne’s career as a costumed vigilante, it will not be an origin story. Whether or not we will see those pearls hit the ground is anybody’s guess — we’re betting yes, since it’s a movie with Batman in it — but even if so, the Dark Knight’s origin story won’t be the primary focus of the film, which stars Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne/Batman.

The film will reportedly take place in the second year of Batman’s career, and visual elements of the costume, sets, and other things that have been noticed by set spies line up with everything from the Court of Owls to The Zero Year to the old Adam West Batman series. The movie will also feature a large number of Batman’s villains, although it seems that the most prominent ones in the main story are Carmine Falcone, Catwoman, and The Penguin.

“I wanted to do not an origin tale, but a tale that would still acknowledge his origins, in that it formed who he is,” Reeves told Nerdist. “Like this guy, he’s majorly struggling, and this is how he’s trying to rise above that struggle. But that doesn’t mean that he even fully understands, you know. It’s that whole idea of the shadow self and what’s driving you, and how much of that you can incorporate, and how much of it you’re doing that you’re unaware of.”

The idea, then, appears to be depicting a formative early story that takes Batman from being the kind of early, proto-version of himself that appears in things like Gotham and Batman: Year One, and elevates him to the superheroic ideal that we see in the comics and in films like Batman and Justice League.

Pattinson stars in The Batman, which will chronicle some of his earlier years as a vigilante fighting crime in Gotham City. The main cast also includes Zoe Kravitz as Selina Kyle/Catwoman, Colin Farrell as Oswald Cobblepot/Penguin, Paul Dano as Edward Nashton/The Riddler, Jeffrey Wright as James Gordon, John Turturro as Carmine Falcone, Peter Sarsgaard as District Attorney Gil Colson, and Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth. Reeves is directing from a script he wrote with Mattson Tomlin.

The Batman arrives in theaters on June 25, 2021.