The Batman has been hailed as one of the Dark Knight's greatest big screen adventures, and filmmaker Matt Reeves definitely made some welcome changes to the character's portrayal.
For starters, we finally got to see Batman demonstrate why he's often been hailed as the World's Greatest Detective, while it was also refreshing for Robert Pattinson to not use a typical "Bat-voice." We've seen actors head down that route with mixed results over the years, but in The Batman's Director's Commentary, Reeves explained why this Bruce Wayne really doesn't sound that different.
"I knew I didn’t wanna do a Batman that had been done previously, that had the growl that we’d seen," he revealed. "Because I knew that in this version, if you’re gonna do a detective story, Batman is gonna have a lot of dialogue scenes. Which, when you actually look at all the movies, Bruce may have a lot of long dialogue scenes but Batman’s dialogue scenes, he has dialogue but it’s controlled."
"This, by literally the necessity of solving this crime, was going to require him to have to have long dialogue scenes in that suit and some are very emotional. If he was growling, we wouldn’t be able to connect to him emotionally. There was a real exploration to figure out how to make that work."
That makes perfect sense, but one popular theory about The Batman's final battle has now been debunked. In the recently released The Art of The Batman book, it's confirmed that the green liquid the Caped Crusader injects himself with was simple adrenaline. Fans had become convinced it could be Venom given the way Bruce "Hulks Out," but we clearly won't be seeing Bane in this world quite yet.
Batman carrying a vial of adrenaline for when he's pushed to his limits is a clever way to drive home that he is just a normal man, and heading down the Venom route might be a tad far-fetched. Grounding this Gotham City in reality was clearly a priority for Reeves, so those more fantastical elements of the Dark Knight's world are unlikely to be too much of a priority for the filmmaker.
The Batman is now streaming on HBO Max.