The Batman.

That’s the name of the film. It’s gone through some development pains over at Warner Bros. Ben Affleck is still attached to star as Bruce Wayne and Batman, but he’s no longer the writer/director on the project. That role belongs to Planet of the Apes director, Matt Reeves. And now that his film War for the Planet of the Apes is in theatres and his duties on that film have come to a conclusion, more or less, he can start focusing on The Batman.

And the news outlets know it and are starting to ask more and more Batman-centric questions.

Case in point, Yahoo Movies caught up with the director and asked him about his plans for The Batman. His response was, “It’s my hope to tell a very emotional Batman story.” He then went on to add that he sees, “… a very strong parallel between [Batman and Caesar] because they’re both damaged characters who are grappling to do the right thing in a very imperfect world. A world that’s filled with all the corruption that is human.”  

Reeves then went on to add to this saying that, “…the metaphors of both of the franchises [Batman and Apes] enable you to tell stories that have deep emotional resonance” and that it’s this emotional capacity that excites him to those stories and excites him to tell them. In fact, he’s been on both the Batman and the Planet of the Apes trains since he was young. As he says, “It’s interesting because I was obsessed with both as a child, and yet there is something potentially very adult about what you can explore under the cover of that fantasy. That is what draws me to it, and that’s what I’m excited about.”

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Certainly, at least in Batman’s case, it is very interesting how much the character is able to straddle the line between being entertainment for children but also being very adult. There’s no question that comics started off as entertainment for kids, but soon becamse entertainment for adults. While various points of this transition can be seen peppered throughout the history of comics, it’s not until Alan Moore and Frank Miller in the 80’s that you get supremely adult titles for Batman, such as The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke.

What stories Reeves will pull from, what story he’ll choose to tell, is all still very much in the air. At one time Joe Manganiello was signed on to be Slade Wilson, a.k.a. Deathstroke, but that hasn’t been spoken of for some time. Deathstroke has never really been a Batman villain, though the two have certainly come to blows more than a few times. It’s likely that whatever the Deathstroke storyline was, that will now be tamed down or folded into any number of the other Batman/Gotham stories that DC is telling in their DCEU.

In the mean time, we’d love to put in our vote for a Riddler story? Perhaps Hush?

Matt Key
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