Like Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy, The Batman will clearly deliver a grounded take on the Caped Crusader's world. Director Matt Reeves drove that point home during a recent press event, but despite admitting that he's looking to move away from some of the more "fantastical" elements of Batman's world, he remains open to trying to reinvent some of Gotham City's weirder denizens.
Among them is a villain we last saw on the big screen played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Batman & Robin (the character also made his live-action debut on television in Gotham a few years back).
"In my view, I just feel drawn to finding the grounded version of everything. So to me it would be a challenge in an interesting way to try and figure out how that could happen, even the idea of something like Mr. Freeze, that such a great story, right? I think there's actually a grounded version of that story, which could be really powerful and could be really great," Reeves explained.
"I love the fantastical side of Batman, but this iteration, obviously, while being, to me, I think it is very comics faithful, but I don't think that this one is necessarily, it doesn't lean as hard into the fantastical, I guess. I think to me what would be interesting would be to try and unwind the fantastical and see, well, how could that make sense here? That's kind of my view, how I see it."
While some fans will inevitably be disappointed to hear that The Batman isn't going to fully embrace the wackiness of Gotham City, everything we've seen from the movie thus far suggests it will still be faithful to the source material. Sure, Robert Pattinson's Batman probably won't be squaring off with the versions of villains like Clayface and Poison Ivy we're familiar with, but with Edward Nashton/The Riddler reinvented as a Zodiac Killer-style murderer, that's not necessarily going to be a bad thing!
Regardless, we're intrigued to see what Reeves has in mind for both The Batman and this trilogy.
The Batman is set to be released in theaters on March 4.