The Batman: How Gotham City Will Be Different

The Batman trailer at DC Fandome finally gave Batman fans a look at the dark, Noir world that director Matt Reeves is creating. Not just in the sense of the freaky case of murder and mystery Robert Pattinson‘s Batman will be drawn into, but also in terms of the literal world of Gotham City that Reeves is building. The Batman‘s version of Gotham will truly need to feel like an entire world of its own, as Reeves and Warner Bros. are already pushing forward with an entire Gotham P.D. TV series for HBO Max. To meet that challenge, Reeves wasted no time explaining how his Gotham City will be different from the one fans have seen onscreen before.

Here’s what Matt Reeves teased about why The Batman‘s version of Gotham City will be different from its movie predecessors when asked by a fan:

“What should the fans expect to see from Gotham City in this film. Thank you. You’re absolutely right: it’s just as important as any of the Rogues Gallery. It’s sort of like the nature of what this place is, and the history of it is critically important to our story and one of the things that I really wanted to do because it is the center of the story – especially the history of corruption in the city.

[That] was I wanted to present it in a way that was really fleshed out, I wanted it to feel like an American city you’d never been to. I mean other iterations… the Burton one had very, very, theatrical, beautiful sets – and Nolan had the version that he created in Batman Begins and that was… parts of Chicago and parts of Pittsburgh. And what we’re trying to do is create a version of it that you haven’t seen before.

So some of the locations that we’ve chosen… let’s say there’s like, we have like a Gotham square, so that’s like Times Square right now, if we shot it in Times Square then you’d be like I guess Gotham is New York. But in our case, it’s actually going to be Liverpool. And the idea is to go to Liverpool, where there’s all the sort of the foundation of the Gothic architecture, and then add all of the more modern structures in through CG… Now that I’ve floated off course I’ve told you what it is… so that aspect of Gotham and realizing it has been for me, one of the great pleasures in getting to make the movie.”

It’s interesting to hear Reeves’s theory on making his version of Gotham City. It’s kind of a bridge between the hyper-real theatrical world of Burton, and the ultra-realism that Nolan went for using actual cities as his backdrop. Fans are already comparing The Batman‘s tone to that of Se7en, which just so happened to also make good use out of a cityscape that was not a real place, but still felt like it could be so many different actual cities.

The Batman will be in theaters on October 1, 2021.