Robert Pattinson Reveals The Batman Opens With a Jarring First Shot That Establishes It as a Detective Story

With the number of movies that have been made that feature Batman, each one aims to offer a slightly different perspective of the figure, with The Batman star Robert Pattinson recently recalling that the opening shot of his new film is “jarring” and serves to establish the narrative as being different from all of its predecessors. Given that Batman is known to be an incredible detective, the cast and crew of the upcoming film have often expressed how the project aims to lean into those themes more heavily than films that came before it. The Batman is scheduled to land in theaters on March 4th.

“I watched a rough cut of the movie by myself,” Pattinson recently expressed to GQ. “And the first shot is so jarring from any other Batman movie that it’s just kind of a totally different pace. It was what [filmmaker] Matt [Reeves] was saying from the first meeting I had with him: ‘I want to do a ’70s noir detective story, like The Conversation.’ And I kind of assumed that meant the mood board or something, the look of it. But from the first shot, it’s, ‘Oh, this actually is a detective story.’ And I feel like an idiot, because I didn’t even know that Batman was ‘the world’s greatest detective’; I hadn’t heard that in my life before-but it really plays. Just ’cause there’s a lot of stuff where he’s in amongst the cops.” 

He added, “Normally, when you see Batman he arrives and beats people up. But he’s having conversations, and there are emotional scenes between them, which I don’t think have been in any of the other movies.”

The new film is set to see The Riddler be the main antagonist to Batman, with Reeves recently elaborating on the ways in which he reimagined the villain as an even more sinister figure.

“Early on, this idea of doing a serial-killer story popped into my head, and I started thinking about superheroes; the idea of wearing costumes,” Reeves shared with Total Film. “I read Mindhunter. It made me think of the Zodiac killer, and how he actually wore this primitive costume that really is a primitive superhero costume… a rogues’ gallery costume. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s really scary, the idea of people really wearing masks, and withholding their identities, and terrorizing people, and how scary that is.’ And so I started thinking, ‘Well, it could be an origin tale for the Riddler, and it could be an origin tale for some of these other characters.’”

The Batman will be landing in theaters on March 4th.

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