2022 PREVIEW
DARKESTK NIGHT
SERIAL KILLERS. CLAWS. AND… KURT COBAIN? IN OUR WORLD-EXCLUSIVE STORY, DIRECTOR MATT REEVES, STAR ROBERT PATTINSON AND MORE TELL US HOW YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THE BATMAN LIKE THIS…
WORDS DAN JOLIN
WHEN HE WAS
THREE OR FOUR
YEARS OLD,
MATT REEVES
FELL ILL WITH
A FEVER.
His temperature soared so high, he needed to be constantly hydrated. Day and night, his parents fed him water through an eyedropper. And as they did so, a dark figure in a cowl and a cap manifested from the shadows above him.
“I remember very distinctly, even to this day, seeing Batman on the ceiling,” Reeves tells Empire. “I wasn’t afraid of him. I just thought, ‘Oh. Batman is on my ceiling.’” He smiles, like he’s speaking of an old friend. “There was something about him that connected to me.”
When Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s crimefighting creation appeared in the pyretic Reeves’ bedroom, the character had already been going for three decades: in comic books, film serials, radio dramas, stage shows and, premiering in 1966 (the same year Reeves was born), the wildly popular TV show starring Adam West.
During the next half-century, his popularity proliferated, through bold graphic-novel reinterpretations such as Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One and Jeph Loeb’s The Long Halloween (Loeb, by the way, taught Reeves screenwriting at the University of Southern California), plus the blockbuster movies of Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher, Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder. And that’s not even inclu ding all the recent spin-offs and sidesh ows, taking in Todd Phillips’ Joker, The CW’s Batwoman and Epix’s Pennywort h. Even Michael Keaton’s 1989 Batm an is making a retrotastic comeback in next year’s multiverse-hopping The Flash.
One might argue that we’ve reached the point of Bat-saturation. So how can Matt Reeves’ The Batman, the first stand-alone Batman movie since Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, bring anything new to the table?
“Batman is 80 years of blood,” says producer Dylan Clark, who also worked with Reeves on Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes and War For The Planet Of The Apes. “It’s a thing that’s so intense that when you say yes to it” — as Reeves and he did in February 2017 — “you immediately feel, ‘Oh shit, what have we done? How do we do this?’” However, that concern did not curtail the ir ambition. Explains Clark: “I’ve said this to Chris Nolan directly: ‘Look, we’re trying to be the best Batman ever made, and we’re going to try to beat you.’”
How they hope to achieve this is rooted in Reeves’ feverish childhood encounter, which, he says, “speaks to the mythic power of the character.” But also, it’s personal, in the same way that Planet Of The Apes was to Reeves, having been enraptured by the TV show as a kid during the ’70s; or his 2010 vampire-drama remake Let Me In, which echoed his memories of being bullied at school.