The Batman Star Jeffrey Wright Celebrates Filming Wrap One Year After Pandemic Shutdown

One year after the burgeoning coronavirus pandemic shut down production on The Batman, that’s a wrap for Jeffrey Wright‘s Gotham City cop Jim Gordon. On March 14, 2020, Warner Bros. announced a 14-day production pause just weeks into London filming on the Matt Reeves-directed reboot starring Robert Pattinson as a rookie caped crusader. Reeves confirmed production was halted indefinitely on March 25, and with filming still on pause, the studio delayed Batman by 14 weeks in late April. After moving from June to October 2021, and moving again from October to spring 2022, filming resumed in September and wrapped on March 13 — 356 days out from Batman‘s scheduled opening on March 4, 2022.

Joining Reeves in celebrating The Batman wrapping on Instagram, Wright wrote: “Gordon out. …for now. Exactly one year after shutting down. Some ride.🦇 “

Months after the shutdown, Warner Bros. debuted the first Batman trailer during its first-ever virtual DC FanDome event in August. According to Wright, whose Jim Gordon joins forces with Pattinson’s Batman two years into his crime-fighting career, some footage appearing in the premiere trailer was photographed the same day The Batman pressed pause.

“One of those scenes in particular, we were filming on the day, on the last day that we shot. We shut down March 13 on a Friday, some of the stuff that we were filming that day is in that trailer. We were really stoked about what we were doing,” Wright told Sirius XM over the summer. “First of all the script. When I read the script I said to myself, ‘Yeah this is on it,’ because as you describe about [Wright’s HBO series] Westworld, this show is very much about mystery.”

On Reeves’ detective-driven Batman story, Wright added, “You go back to the original, it’s DC, it’s Detective Comics and the script is really beholden to that, beholden to this idea that Batman is the world’s greatest detective. I think as [Dark Knight trilogy actor] Gary Oldman once described, Gordon has something of a Watson to him. The script honors that and it also set a tone that was very clear, and a tone that has been captured in that trailer.”

Starring Robert Pattinson as Batman, Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman, Paul Dano as the Riddler, Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth, Jeffrey Wright as Jim Gordon, and Colin Farrell as the Penguin, DC Films’ The Batman opens in theaters on March 4, 2022.