Though he started out his career directing rom-coms and drama series, Matt Reeves is now fully immersed in genre filmmaking, something the director credits for helping in his decision to direct “The Batman.”
During his DC FanDome panel (via THR), Reeves talked about not really intending to make the kind of movies he’s spent the past decade making, despite being a huge Batman fan. “As I got deeper into genre, that was a way to do very emotional stories under the guise of these very mythic stories,” Reeves said. If you take a look at either “Let the Right One In,” or any of his “Planet of the Apes” movies, it’s easy to see how he came at that realization.
It is also easy to see, then, why a movie set in the second year of Batman’s career would draw Reeves in. When describing his take on the character, Reeves said this Bruce Wayne would not be a proper hero that inspires the people of Gotham, but a “broken” man “confronting the shadow side of himself.”
Sure, you could say this doesn’t sound that different from other versions of Batman we’ve seen, but what may differentiate this version is the Year Two setting, which has Batman already established in Gotham, and seeing his “experiment” to see if one man can change Gotham provide less than stellar results. As Reeves hints, the film will explore the deeply corrupt nature of the city, its police department, and even the Wayne family itself.
This idea was recently explored in the New 52 Batman comicbook run by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, which explored a secret conspiracy spanning the entire history of Gotham, as well as the long history of the Wayne family and its importance to the city, including their sins.
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The Court of Owls served as the villains in that run, and they’ve since made the jump to TV in “Gotham,” and the upcoming “Gotham Knights” video game, perhaps they’ll also make their film debut soon?