The Batman
Batman has been in a strange spot at the present moment, with Matt Reeves’ The Batman universe running alongside the new DCU universe which will feature a separate Batman for a ‘Brave and the Bold’ movie. But now things are getting even more messy.
It’s been announced that Reeves’ The Batman Part 2 (which is not actually called that, it turns out) will be delayed a full year from October 2026 to October 2027. This is after previously delays from 2024 to 2025, then 2025 to 2026, and it will be five years after the original. This is…not great, but James Gunn took to social media to explain that it’s pretty simple:
“The only reason for the delay is there isn’t a full script (those of you who follow me here probably know that already). Matt is committed to making the best film he possibly can, and no one can accurately guess exactly how long a script will take to write. Once there is a finished script, there is around two years for pre-production, shooting and post-production on big films.”
So, the idea there is that since the script will not be finished until some time in 2025, two years past that is 2027. However, this is not the only Batman delay going on, as the DCU’s own The Brave and the Bold has been “postponed.” That’s according to director Andy Muschietti, who had this to say about the topic during a recent interview:
“I’m now writing a science fiction movie that I would like to do… Batman is a project that’s been postponed a bit. So there could be another film before it, possibly that one.”
The Brave and the Bold
If this is indeed happening, last we heard was that the Brave and the Bold script was “not quite where I want [it] to be yet,” Gunn had said. So that means if that’s not in, and it’s two years to make a new film, we are talking 2027 and beyond, at least. Likely more than that if Muschietti is saying he’s going to do another film before it. That is if he stays director. Muschietti was originally picked in 2023 due to how much James Gunn raved about The Flash, a movie that would go on to be a massive DCEU loser for WB. But this recent update suggests that yes, he’s still doing it.
All of these lengthy delays and seemingly hard-to-crack scripts have led fans, once again, to the idea that perhaps these just end up combined with Robert Pattinson’s Batman becoming DCU Batman after all. I’ve gone over this a few times already, but there are big, big problems with executing this:
- If this were to happen, it feels like The Brave and The Bold would simply have to be killed off. It would not remotely work with Pattinson’s timeline and story in the Reeves’ universe without some sort of weird time jump tomfoolery.
- The DCU would be wildly out of sorts with Reeves’ “grounded” universe which has no supernatural or say, Clayface-like elements to it, when that’s clearly the route Gunn wants to go (Clayface is literally going to be a third movie in the DCU, somehow, because the script’s done).
There is something to be said about combining such disparate vibes and universes because well, that’s sort of Batman and Superman’s whole deal as such different characters, and we’ve seen those “World Finest” pairings produce great results for ages in the comics. Gotham and Metropolis stories have always been enormously different.
For now, this does not appear to be happening at all. But if The Batman Part 2 is indeed 2-3 years off and The Brave and the Bold is even further out, plans can obviously change. And it’s possible, the way things are going, they might.
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