James Gunn Gives Update on The Brave and the Bold and New Batman Actor

The dynamic duo of James Gunn and Peter Safran answered the Bat-Signal to give an update on The Brave and the Bold. ComicBook attended a presser on the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank, where the co-chairmen and CEOs of DC Studios briefed reporters and answered questions about the state of the DC Universe. Questions like: Will Robert Pattinson be the DCU Batman? Is Andy Muschietti still attached to direct The Brave and the Bold? And if not Pattinson, when and where will the Dark Knight next appear after a cameo on the animated Creature Commandos?

To answer the most pressing and oft-asked question, Gunn and Safran said it’s “very unlikely” that Pattinson, who played a year-two caped crusader in 2022’s The Batman movie, will double as the DCU’s Batman. (Creature Commandos established that the Batman of this universe has been active for more than a decade.)

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Gunn added “it’s certainly not the plan” to merge Matt Reeves’ Batman universe with the DCU, despite a fondness for Pattinson and his Dark Knight. “We love him, but we’ve got to introduce a Batman into the DCU,” said Safran. “It’s imperative, and so that’s the plan with Brave and the Bold.” (Gunn and Safran are producing the Reeves-directed Batman 2, which is slated for Oct. 1, 2027 as the next chapter in the Batman Epic Crime Saga that is separate from the DCU.)

“We’ve talked about literally every permutation on the way to come into this job, in terms of how were we going to handle it, what actors were going to continue over, what were we going to merge,” Gunn said. “We’ve talked about everything. Have we ever talked about [actor] Grant Gustin [from the long-running CW series The Flash]? Yeah. Have we ever talked about Robert Pattinson? Yeah. We’ve talked about all those things. But serious conversations? No.”

As for whether the DCU Batman could appear before The Brave and the Bold, Gunn said, “I wouldn’t rule anything out. He could show up in something else. But the actor doesn’t exist [yet].”

That “something else” could be Clayface, an R-rated body horror about the mud-based, shape-shifting Batman villain that will be directed by James Watkins (Speak No Evil) from a script by Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House). Gunn described the first R-rated DC Studios movie as “psychological,” “gross,” and “pure f—ing horror,” and firmly set in the DCU. Casting will soon get underway as production is set to begin this summer.

“The only thing that’s in Matt’s world, like his crime saga that he’s telling, is The Batman trilogy, The Penguin series. That’s in that lane,” Safran said. “So still under DC Studios, still under us. We have an incredible relationship with Matt, but those are the only things. It was important that Clayface be part of the DCU. It’s an origin story for a classic Batman villain that we want to have in our world.” Clayface, Gunn added, is “very outside of the grounded, non-super-metahuman characters in Matt’s world.”

The Brave and the Bold, first announced during the DCU slate titled Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters in 2023, remains in “active development.” Safran noted that the story is “coming together nicely,” although it seems with little input from Muschietti. (The It filmmaker was appointed director just before 2023’s The Flash, which Muschietti helmed under the prior DC regime, bombed at the box office.) Muschietti confirmed as recently as January that he’s still attached to direct and has been engaging in talks about “story and tone.”

“We’re developing the Brave and Bold script right now and he’ll be the first one to see it,” Safran said of Muschietti, with Gunn declining to name the film’s screenwriter as it “puts too much pressure on the guy.” Gunn, who is also penning his next project after scripting Superman, seven episodes of Creature Commandos, and eight episodes of Peacemaker season 2, is working with the unnamed writer but is, apparently, not undertaking writing duties himself.

“Everybody knows I love Batman and it’s important to me, so I’m working very closely with the writer on Brave and the Bold,” Gunn said. Elsewhere, Gunn and Safran would confirm that Matthew Orton (Marvel’s Moon Knight, Cleaner) is writing something for DC, but didn’t confirm it was the rumored Bane/Deathstroke movie reported in the press.

The Orton project is “something kind of like” Bane/Deathstroke, Gunn teased. It’s still unclear whether that project might be The Brave and the Bold, perhaps with Bane and Deathstroke as the villains, or something like the team-up Secret Six.

In 2023, Gunn described Brave and the Bold as the film that will introduce the DCU Batman and Robin: Bruce Wayne and his son, the League of Assassins-raised Damian Wayne.

“This is a story of Damian Wayne, who’s Batman’s actual son that he didn’t know existed for the first eight to ten years of his life,” Gunn said at the time. “He was raised as a little murderer and assassin. He’s my favorite Robin. It’s based on the Grant Morrison comic run, which is one of my favorite Batman runs. We’re putting it all together right now.” And like its comic counterpart, Batman and Son, Safran added the movie is “going to feature other members of the extended Bat-Family, just because we feel like they’ve been left out of the Batman stories in the theater for far too long.”

The Brave and the Bold remains undated. Gunn’s Superman movie is set to take flight first on July 11, followed by Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow on June 26, 2026; the James Watkins-directed Clayface is scheduled for Sept. 11, 2026, while Matt Reeves’ The Batman Part II is slated for Oct. 1, 2027.