Warner Bros CEO Comments On The Batman Production Timeline

The Batman recently resumed filming in the UK, but the production had to be shut down yet again after the film’s star, Robert Pattinson, tested positive for COVID-19. News that the production had been paused emerged yesterday, with reports simply saying that a member of the production team had contracted the virus. It was later revealed that Pattinson is the one who is sick as reported by Vanity Fair. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. CEO Ann Sarnoff revealed there is no timeline to get back to work on the film.

“I don’t see things material changing until there is a medical solution, unless we were to reach herd immunity somehow. Instead, we are just proceeding as if there won’t be and resuming production as safely as we can,” Sarnoff explained.

Sarnoff also spoke to Deadline yesterday and explained the studio is trying to figure out what happened. “We’re still in the middle of investigating what is the situation,” she shared. “We’re pausing temporarily for now until we have more information, but we have all the protocols set up to do contact tracing and hopefully get back up into production very soon.”

Comicbook.com’s Russ Burlingame broke down the typical procedure with positive tests yesterday as the news came down from Vanity Fair.

“Typically the quarantine time with a positive test is two weeks, and as far as production resuming, we’ll have to wait and see how the studio proceeds,” he wrote. “Every studio seems to handle positive tests a bit differently, but it stands to reason that the star of the film would be difficult to continue without.”

“Since the start of the pandemic, there has been speculation that returning to production on big tentpole blockbusters would be difficult, given the sheer number of people on set at any given time,” Burlingame continued. “Superhero movies are even more challenging, given the frequent need for long sits in the makeup chair or intimate contact with numerous people who help them on and off with makeup, tight-fitting costumes, or the rigs needed to simulate flight or other superheroic abilities.”

As for The Batman, director Matt Reeves recently spoke about what makes his films different from previous Batman movies.

“It’s not an origin tale, and you’re meeting him in the early days,” Reeves explained. “What’s really important about this iteration is that you know a lot of the other stories are about how he had to master his fear and master himself in order to become Batman and that in that Batman state, he’s sort of in his best self, and I think for me, what was exciting was not doing that, not doing the origin, not doing what we’ve seen done so beautifully in other movies, but instead to meet him in the middle of this criminological experiment to see him in the becoming of Batman and to see him make mistakes as Batman, see him grow and fail and be heroic do all of the things that we associate with Batman but in a way that felt very human and very flawed.”

For now, The Batman is scheduled to be released on October 1, 2021.