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With less than a week to go before Matt Reeves’ The Batman hits theaters, the director is opening up about whether other superheroes from DC, including Superman, could possibly show up in sequels.
Obviously, there’s already a shared universe out there that features the likes of Wonder Woman, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and the HBO Max hit show Peacemaker — but Robert Pattinson’s Dark Knight exists in his own separate pocket of the mythology, with Reeves instead using the term “Batverse” to describe his his world.
When asked point blank if we may see Superman show up in a sequel to The Batman (via Collider), the director said it was “a high wire act” just to get the Caped Crusader and his 80-year legacy as a character right, never mind introducing other A-listers.
“So the last thing I wanted to do was come in there and feel like I had to do something with the highest degree of difficulty and then also find the ways that it connects to everything else. So my thing was, from the beginning, I said, look, I think it’s enough to try and just do a ‘Batverse,’ to do a Batman movie and that that’s where this begins.”
However, Reeves didn’t totally close the door on the possibility of Superman perhaps entering the Batverse at some point in the future, saying it’s “not impossible” to believe the world “could connect to something else” somewhere down the line.
“But that was not my interest in this. And it’s not my interest in what we would do in follow ups, at the moment, either,” he said.
Reeves went on to explain that much of his filmography, including the Planet of the Apes movies and Cloverfield, often center around a single fantastical element, with everything surrounding that in the world being grounded and realistic.
“So if suddenly, in the Batman world, you discovered that there was an alien that was Superman, there’d be a lot of shock. I mean, people would have to say like ‘oh my god,’ and maybe that would be the one fantastical element.”
However, the director clarified that bringing the Man of Steel into the mix is “not the intention at this point”, with the focus remaining on Gotham, although he did add that “if that challenge ever presents itself, it would be an exciting one to explore.”
The more grounded take of an alien causing shock and awe to the global citizens of the world honestly sounds a lot like what Zack Snyder was initially going for with 2013’s Man of Steel.
Henry Cavill’s debut as the Kryptonian almost felt like it was meant to be a continuation of Christopher Nolan’s realistic Batman universe for a hot second there (which it was originally pitched as). However, the grounded approach went somewhat out of the window completely in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, despite Dark Knight trilogy scribe David S. Goyer contributing to the screenplay.