There’s a strange quiet over Gotham these days.
Not peace exactly - Gotham has never been very good at peace. The city still smells faintly of damp after half of it flooded during the events of The Batman. The water eventually receded, the generators kicked back on, and Gotham did what Gotham always does: carried on committing crime.
The Penguin returned to take power in the city, filling the vacuum left by the fall of crime boss Maroni.
But one thing never quite returned.
Batman.
According to sources inside Wayne Enterprises’ IT department, anyone attempting to contact the city’s most punctual nocturnal vigilante now receives an automated message:
“Thank you for your email. I am currently out of the office while Matt Reeves completes work on The Batman Part II.”
The auto-reply has reportedly been active since 2022.
Across Gotham’s criminal community, confusion has begun to spread.
A group of burglars reportedly lingered on a warehouse rooftop for nearly three hours after a robbery last month, convinced Batman was simply running late.
“We figured he was rescuing people from the knee-deep flood water again in broad daylight,” one of them said. “What was up with that anyway?”
Eventually they packed up and went home.
Without the nightly possibility of a six-foot Bat descending from the sky , Gotham’s criminal economy has entered what experts describe as a “soft restructuring phase.”
Sales of eyeliner have also reportedly slumped to a four-year low.
Supervillains are scaling back. Henchmen are retraining. One former explosives expert is now retraining to be an elementary school teacher.
“It’s not what I imagined when I got into the business,” he admitted. “I build a bomb, set it off, people die. That’s not why I got into bomb-making. What’s the point of making a bomb if nobody is racing to deactivate it?”
For other Gotham criminals, the silence has been unsettling.
“Normally you rob something around here and within fifteen minutes you get jumped by Batman. He breaks your arms, you beg for mercy, he says something cool about vengeance and the police take you away,” says Tony “The Crowbar” Mancini, a mid-tier Gotham mob soldier. “There’s a whole intricate dance that’s meant to go with this thing, y’know.”
One aspiring supervillain who wished to remain nameless told us how he recently took twelve people hostage on a bus downtown.
“We were on that bus for twelve hours,” he said. “Nobody came. It just became awkward. Some of the hostages offered to shout for help but it just felt pointless.”
Professional henchman Bobby Durego - who has spent much of the last decade being thrown against walls before being suspended upside down by the ankle - says the absence has been devastating for morale.
“I mean, crime is booming, but supervillains aren’t hiring henchmen anymore. There’s no need for us now,” Durego explained. “It’s been four years since I got hit in the face by a Batarang and I… I guess I just miss the feeling, y’know?”
But beneath the confusion and concern, Gotham’s unusual situation raises a larger question - one that extends beyond the city and into the strange land of superhero filmmaking.
Characters like Batman don’t really belong to any one filmmaker. Directors talk about “their vision,” studios talk about “their franchise,” but the truth is that Batman has been around since 1939. He’s survived countless actors, reboots, tonal shifts, and at least three separate cinematic universes.
In other words, Batman is one of the few superheroes important enough that audiences feel a certain ownership over him.
When a director comes along, audiences effectively lend them their hero for a while. After a few years, it’s not unreasonable for fans to start wondering what exactly has been happening inside the Batcave.
Over the last four years, Reeves’ Gotham has been slowly taking shape - two years of script writing followed by a long stretch of pre-production. Its star, Robert Pattinson, has spoken highly about the script for the sequel and has said he looks forward to filming this year.
By the time The Batman Part II arrives, Pattinson will have spent nearly five real-world years portraying a Bruce Wayne who is technically still in Year Two of his career as Batman.
This creates a strange bit of blockbuster mathematics worthy of a Christopher Nolan plot: Gotham has now gone longer without Batman than it did with him.
Of course, all of this wait could instantly be forgotten the moment the first trailer drops. If Reeves delivers another rain-soaked detective-noir spectacle, audiences will likely forget the delay overnight and line up once again to watch Gotham implode.
But until that moment arrives, the city remains in a curious holding pattern.
The floodwaters are gone. The Penguin reigns. The Joker sits in Arkham. Crime continues. Gotham waits.
And somewhere above the skyline, the Bat-Signal gathers dust - while Batman’s unread emails on his first day back will likely be in the triple figures.
Meanwhile, in other news, billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne has credited finally getting into a healthy sleeping pattern with his renewed zest for life and noticeable uplift in mood.