Something In The Way

Director Matt Reeves’s Batman reboot is inspired by 1970s cinema, 1980s comic books and… Nirvana.

- Johnny Davis

With great power comes great responsibility. Yes, we know that’s a different superhero, but how is the director of The Batman feeling?

“Terrified,” Matt Reeves says.

The journey to the screen of the new Batman movie has been a long and gruelling one. Almost a decade ago, Ben Affleck was cast as the Caped Crusader in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. It is Affleck’s most successful film at the box office. By every other metric it was a disaster: critics hated it, fans hated it more and it launched DC down a route of superhero ensemble movies (Suicide Squad; Justice League) that got worse and worse. For every new star in an ever-more-twinkling Marvel Cinematic Universe, rival DC couldn’t catch a break. The memory of Christopher Nolan’s benchmark The Dark Knight trilogy appeared to be going gently into that good night. The best bet for Bat fans looked like another outing for Lego Batman, which at least was funny. But DC wanted another Batman movie.

They put in a call to Matt Reeves, director of the acclaimed monster movie Cloverfield (2008), as well as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017). “Ben [Affleck] had been working on a version of the script,” Reeves says, “and I said, ‘Here’s the thing: I respect that the DC Universe has become an extended universe and all the movies were kind of connected. But another Batman film, it shouldn’t have to carry the weight of connecting the characters from all those other movies. I didn’t want them in there.’”