Robert Pattinson has seen the playback. And whatever Matt Reeves is shooting, it doesn’t look like the movie Pattinson made in 2022.
“Matt just wrote this amazing script,” Pattinson said of his co-writer and director. “I think the first one was… it’s difficult to reinvent Batman as this new thing. And then to go in another totally different direction. I’m just looking at the playback on certain things… it looks different to the first one.”
He kept going, and he kept escalating.
“It’s just amazing. It’s a quite radical change of the script. It’s cool that Warner’s behind it, and DC. It’s just crazy. It’s a really radical retelling of Batman. I think people are going to be excited by it.”
The comments came in an interview captured by MYmovies on TikTok, while Pattinson is out promoting his new movie, Primetime. He’s set to put the cowl back on for The Batman Part 2, which lands February 18, 2028. If it holds that date, it’ll open just shy of six years after the first one.
What “radical” could actually mean
Nobody knows, and Pattinson isn’t helping. The Batman was a dark, gritty detective story built around a broody Bruce Wayne trying to unpick the Riddler’s plans. You’d assume the sequel doesn’t stray far from that. But “radical retelling” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and Pattinson is being almost comically vague about what it means. A courtroom drama? A psychological horror movie? A musical? After Joker: Folie à Deux bombed at the box office, probably not a musical.
The likelier read is that Reeves leans harder into the thriller machinery of the first film, or shifts the center of gravity toward the villain. Which villain, though, is still unconfirmed. It’s unclear whether Marvel star Sebastian Stan is playing Harvey Dent / Two-Face, as expected, and even if he is, there’s no confirmation he’s the main antagonist.
The fights are winning
One concrete thing Pattinson has admitted: the action is rougher on him now that he’s in his 40s.
“I’m definitely feeling my age when fighting a lot,” Pattinson told GQ. “I’m literally like, ‘Goddamn, this is significantly harder than it used to be.’ But it’s really fun. And I think the movie’s going to be pretty great. It’s got a really, really fun cast, but it’s a marathon.”
Colin Farrell read the whole thing. He’s in two scenes.
Farrell is back as the crime boss, and he’s cheerfully upfront about how little screen time that involves. He told ScreenRant in June that he’d read the script cover to cover.
“I got to read from the first to last page and it’s really magnificent,” he said. “I just think Matt Reeves is brilliant and he wrote, not only tonally, a really kind of dark and at times terrifying piece, and not only psychologically weighty and nuanced, but really feeling. It’s a really… There’s moments in it. It’s full of feeling. I just think he wrote kind of a contemporary genre masterpiece, really. I’m only in two scenes, which is great because it means I can enjoy the rest of the film.”
This is not the DC Universe. Keep that straight.
Reeves’ Batman films sit outside the ongoing DC Universe, so they don’t share a world with Superman, Supergirl, Lanterns or next year’s Man of Tomorrow. The Batman and the HBO spinoff The Penguin belong to what’s called The Batman Epic Crime Saga. James Gunn’s rebooted DCU will hand the cape to a different actor entirely once The Brave and the Bold gets moving.
Which leaves Pattinson in an unusual spot: the Batman nobody has to reconcile with anything. Reeves can make the strange movie. Warner, by Pattinson’s account, is letting him.
“It’s just crazy,” he said. He’s been saying that a lot.
