The villain of The Batman: Part II is a mystery worthy of the Dark Knight detective. First announced in 2022, director Matt Reeves’ Batman sequel has kept its lead villain under wraps even as the next chapter of the Batman Epic Crime Saga prepares a 2025 shoot ahead of its new 2027 release date. We know that Batman 2 will pick up after the events of The Penguin series (which bridges the gap between the two Robert Pattinson-fronted films) that positioned Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb as new kingpin of Gotham City and Cristin Milioti’s Sofia Falcone — the half-sister of Zoë Kravitz’s Catwoman — as an inmate of Arkham Asylum, incarcerated alongside Paul Dano’s Riddler and Barry Keoghan’s Joker.
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“This year we’re going to be shooting, and I’m very excited about it,” Reeves told MTV News at the 2025 Golden Globes. “There’s a lot of stuff going on, and it’s taking longer than I would have wanted, but also, I’m super excited about what we’re doing. So I really can’t wait to share that with everybody.”
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Asked if the villain will be “surprising,” Reeves said, “I hope so. I think so. The story is a continuation in a certain way and completely different in another, and it’s going to show different sides of Rob. I think it’s going to be really exciting and really cool.”
Rumored villains have included a pre-Two-Face Harvey Dent, the Bruce Wayne-obsessed master impersonator Thomas Elliot/Hush, and even the shape-shifter Clayface (who will headline his own solo movie set in Peter Safran and James Gunn’s DC Universe).
“You just kind of look at [online rumors] casually and go, ‘Is that what they think now? Interesting. Okay,’” Reeves said. “But you just put your head down and do what you do, and try to do it as best you can.”
In September, Reeves confirmed that Farrell’s Penguin will return in The Batman 2, with his eight-episode spinoff series acting as the “entry point” to the next film.
“There are details that actually connect right into the way the next movie begins, and the way that Oz enters that world as we hand the baton back to Batman, and Batman is on another case,” Reeves told SFX Magazine. The director also teased that the sequel is “going to dig into the epic story about deeper corruption, and it goes into places that [Batman] couldn’t anticipate in the first one. The seeds of where this goes are all in the first movie. It expands in a way that will show you aspects of the character you never got to see.”
“Batman is constantly battling these forces. But those forces can’t be entirely exorcised. So the next movie delves deeper into that,” Reeves added.
One villain that can be ruled out: Gentleman Ghost. The supernatural supervillain made an appearance in the Reeves-produced animated series Batman: Caped Crusader, but such fantastical rogues will not be adapted into Reeves’ gritty and grounded universe.
“What was important to me was to find a way to take these pop icons, these mythical characters that everybody knows, and translate it so that Gotham feels like a place in our world. We might push to the edge of the fantastical but we would never go into full fantastical. It’s meant to feel quite grounded,” Reeves explained to SFX Magazine. “It doesn’t mean that you won’t see characters that people love. That’s exactly what we want to do.”
He continued, “Gentleman Ghost is probably pushed a bit too far for us to be able to find a way to do, but there is a fun way to think about how we would take characters that might push over into a bit of the fantastical and find a way to make sense of that.”
Warner Bros. has scheduled The Batman: Part II to open in theaters on Oct. 1, 2027.
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Cristin Milioti as Sofia Falcone in The Penguin -
Image courtesy of DC Studios
