Barry Keoghan’s Joker may get the last laugh in The Batman trilogy. After the Eternals and Saltburn actor made a cameo in 2022’s The Batman movie — and a five-minute deleted scene that was eventually released online — director Matt Reeves insisted that the brief cameo wasn’t setting up The Batman Part II. “The idea was more to say, ‘If you think that trouble is going to go away in Gotham, you can forget it. It’s already here,’” Reeves said of the incarcerated Riddler’s (Paul Dano) budding relationship with his fellow Arkham inmate already jailed by the Dark Knight (Robert Pattinson).
“It’s not an Easter egg scene,” Reeves explained in a 2022 interview. “It’s not one of those end credits Marvel or DC scenes where it’s going, like, ‘Hey, here’s the next movie!’ In fact, I have no idea when or if we would return to that character in the movies.”
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According to a report from Derek Faraci in the Marvelvision podcast, the Joker isn’t in The Batman Part II, but will instead be the main villain in The Batman Part III. The report claims that Keoghan will first reappear in a spinoff series like The Penguin, but it’s unclear if that will be a Joker series or a series featuring the Batman villain.
In the way that Penguin is the bridge between The Batman and The Batman Part II, this rumored series would link the next two films in what Reeves is calling The Batman Epic Crime Saga. /Film corroborated the rumors.
Reeves, along with producer Dylan Clark, were developing future Batman spinoff series set within the Gotham City Police Department and Arkham Asylum, which ultimately did not move forward. It’s possible the Arkham series was reworked to focus on Keoghan’s Joker after the success of HBO’s The Penguin, which follows Oz Cobb’s (Colin Farrell) rise to power in the aftermath of The Batman movie.
“The streaming cable space was was a no-brainer for some of the bigger characters. Casey [Bloys, HBO CEO] was the first person that said ‘I need a marquee character,’” Clark told ComicBook about the decision to spin off Farrell’s Penguin into his own series. “And Matt said, ‘I have this really good idea for Colin for the second movie.‘ And Casey said, ‘I want that.’ You can’t just have have these characters be in the movie space. So it was a natural transition that way, and I think we have some great ideas to explore more characters from our movie space to do this same thing with Casey and Sarah [Aubrey, Max original programming chief].”
The Joker is one such marquee character, as is Zoë Kravitz’s Catwoman. Clark previously revealed the network is developing an as-yet-unrevealed television series set in the world of The Batman.
Warner Bros. Pictures has dated The Batman Part II for October 2, 2026.
