The Batman Production Begins Again

Like a masked vigilante who is vengeance and the night, you can’t keep The Batman down. At least not for long. Five months after production on the Robert Pattinson-led superhero reboot was shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic, Warner Bros. is gearing up for filming on The Batman to begin again.

The news, which comes just days before DC Entertainment’s much anticipated DC Fandome, reveals Matt Reeves is expected to resume shooting the movie in early September. Indeed, it’s been previously reported that construction on new sets has already begun this month at the film’s base of operations in London’s Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden. Inside the same studios where previous Batman movie Justice League was filmed, Pattinson will again don the cowl of DC’s most popular superhero.

Production on The Batman previously stopped in late March, like all other Hollywood movies, as the full extent of the COVID-19 pandemic began to be understood. In recent months though, Hollywood has cautiously started resuming production on fiscal year-defining blockbusters, including Universal Pictures’ Jurassic World: Dominion, which became the first production to recommence filming at London’s Pinewood Studios last month. James Cameron’s Avatar sequels have also resumed filming in New Zealand.

The five-month hiatus The Batman has been on also caused the movie to be delayed from its original June 2021 release date to Oct. 1, 2021. This will make it the first live-action Batman movie not be released during the heat of summer.

The Batman is co-written and directed by Reeves, whose previous credits include Let Me In and the lasts two-thirds of 20th Century Fox’s recent Planet of the Apes trilogy, which starred Andy Serkis. A filmmaker known for his emphasis on quiet empathy and humanity, Reeves developed a well-known style unusual among blockbusters before making the plunge into Gotham City. And in Gotham, he’s offering a distinctly different take on the Batman mythos than what was recently seen in the last two Zack Snyder movies, which starred Ben Affleck in the body suit.

In addition to recasting the Dark Knight with Robert Pattinson now in the lead role, the film is also going to be set early in Bruce Wayne’s career as a nocturnal vigilante. While this has some obvious overlap with the first two-thirds of Christopher Nolan’s own The Dark Knight Trilogy from the mid-2000s, Warners and Reeves are clearly banking on time, as well as a different angle to those early years, will distinguish this version. That includes Batman operating in a Gotham City where he already has a full rogue’s gallery of enemies to interact and fight, including Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman, Paul Dano as the Riddler, and Colin Farrell as the Penguin. However, it also includes how Bruce is personally explored.

Den of Geek recently spoke with Mattson Tomlin, who co-wrote The Batman with Reeves. On the new movie, Tomlin said, “I think that really looking at Batman as somebody who has gone through this trauma, and then everything that he’s doing is then a reaction to that, rather than shy away from that, I think this film leans into that in some very fun and surprising ways.”

The Batman comes out on Oct. 1, 2021.