Robert Pattinson Officially Addresses His Batman Crossing Over to James Gunn’s DCU

When James Gunn and Peter Safran rolled out their grand plan for the start of the DCU, it included the previously revealed Superman movie that Gunn would write and direct, but also confirmation of a new take on Batman in The Brave and the Bold. There was just one problem, though: a year prior, DC fans had fully fallen in love with Matt Reeves’ take on Batman that starred Robert Pattinson as the Dark Knight detective. What became clear is that DC Studios wanted to continue exploring this version of the character while also having a Batman that existed in the DCU alongside David Corenswet’s Man of Steel.

Delays in The Batman Part II meant delays in the DCU Batman, which meant fans had an idea of how to fix it: just put Robert Pattinson’s Batman in the DCU. It’s been talked to death by fans and Gunn himself, calling it not likely (though not ruling it out either). Now, Pattinson himself has sounded off on the potential, telling LadBible that the idea is “interesting” but revealing, “It would be kind of tough to have this version of Bruce outside of that world.” Pattinson’s reasoning for why it would be tough, though, is one more about the difficult shooting conditions and what it might do to him.

Robert Pattinson Sounds off on Batman Joining DCU

Pattinson continued, revealing that the extensive nighttime shoots on The Batman can become quite tiresome for him as a performer, and by contrast, appearing on the set of a brightly-lit Superman movie in the DCU would be whiplash. “It’s one of the only characters, because of the length of the shoot, but also it’s such a specific kind of [style], the tone of it gets inside you. I remember that happened to me the last time I did it; it took a while. You’re just in the dark the whole time. Both mood-wise and light-wise, I can’t see anything for like months.”

Pattinson and Skyler Gisondo, who appear in Primetime together and the latter of whom plays Jimmy Olsen in the DCU, said that if he did join the franchise at large, they could share the screen together in a world with “Batman and Jimmy Olsen going after pedophiles,” which Gisondo called a “pretty cool idea.”

It’s worth noting that if Pattinson’s Batman was eventually the one brought into the DCU, it could probably actually work pretty well. To date, there are only a handful of references to Batman across DCU projects, like a name-drop in this week’s Lanterns, a tease of Gotham in Superman, and a brief appearance in Creature Commandos. As such, a simple retcon could be made that the events of The Batman happen much earlier in the timeline of the DCU compared to more recent releases.

That said, there’s a major wrinkle in about four weeks’ time that might make Pattinson’s Batman fully impossible to integrate into the DCU: the upcoming Clayface movie. Even though the upcoming movie almost certainly has no appearance by Batman and might have minimal references to him at all, the fact that it is largely set in Gotham City but has no carryover from the Gotham seen in The Batman or The Penguin could make this thought experiment null and void.

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