***Disclaimer: This is the opinion of 1 cynical old man. YMMV and you're certainly free to express your discontent with me in the comments section below.***
People say "BUT BUT BUT... There's precedent in the comics..."
Batman has had comics published every single month (in many cases multiple titles monthly) since 1939. Yes, some of those THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS of stories were badly written and poorly thought out.
Which is why you take the parts of the mythology that resonate most with the culture and present THOSE to the GA in the movie theater.
It's not like a comic, where you can say "Oh, we screwed up, we'll get it right next month." This movie took 3 years and cost a quarter of a BILLION dollars. You only get one shot every few years. Why would you be willing to misrepresent YOUR character in front of so many sets of eyes with so much on the line?
There are 3 basic tenets of Batman:
1. His parents stay dead.
2. He doesn't use guns because his parents were killed by a gun.
3. He doesn't kill, because he understands the unintended consequences of murder (such as, oh I don't know... an innocent boy becoming an orphan?)
It's such an important foundation of who that character is at their core, that I don't understand how you could change any of those things and still call him the same character.
Marketing 101 is consistent branding. It's not even like you have to build the brand. It's already built for you. But you're so embarrassed about what that brand is that you butcher it in front of the very people who've built it up for you.
Shame on you, DC/WB. Awful.
We are the people who buy your comics. We buy your t-shirts, action figures, Funko POPs... We wear your characters on our underwear and socks BECAUSE WE LOVE THEM. We grew up on them.
And this is how you repay us.
Why doesn't Batman use guns? Why doesn't Batman kill?