With many Batman movies to view, it’s only a matter of time before DC Comics’ Dark Knight returns with a brand new storyline. In the new Matt Reeves-directed epic starring Robert Pattinson, the character appears to be a new take on the character. However, it does wear its influences up its sleeves.
Bruce Wayne faces off against some of Gotham’s most notorious criminals early in the film. However, it does not serve as an origin story for the character. At this point, Batman’s tragic backstory is well-known, with nearly every big-screen portrayal of the character experiencing it. Marvel’s wall-crawler is the only other comic character to have seen his origin in the theater so many times.
Recent quotes from The Batman’s director indicate that the trend of seeing Martha and Thomas Wayne’s deaths on-screen may be coming to an end.
No Batman Origins Story?
Matt Reeves, the director of the upcoming DC film Batman, has revealed that the origin story of the Caped Crusader will not be retold.
For Reeves, “[fans] have seen [that origin] so many times” and “[they] knew they couldn’t do that,” Reeves stated to Esquire. Filmmaker Christopher Nolan said that “it’s been done too much” and that it was time for a new approach to the superhero genre.
Spider-Man’s origin story is a similar strategy employed by Marvel Studios when it introduced the MCU’s Spider-Man after audiences had seen the story twice in Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man franchises.
Oh, Martha!
Just because Reeves and co. are not going to explicitly show what happened before Batman was born, doesn’t mean they aren’t going to include the tragic deaths of Thomas Wayne and Martha Wayne in the film’s larger canon.
Fans don’t have to see the gruesome origins, which are evident from the film’s released footage. Consider the Tom Holland-led Spider-Man movies from Marvel Studios. Seeing Holland’s Peter Parker get bitten by the radioactive arachnid was unnecessary because the audience already knows Spider-Man’s origins.
Filmmakers then use this assumption of familiarity to surprise longtime fans by playing with expectations and introducing elements from the larger canon (i.e., Aunt May giving the “With great responsibility” speech in Spider-Man: No Way Home). Now that fans know where Bruce is in his Batman journey – or at least assume they know it – Warner can add a few surprises as the story calls for them.
To be clear, this does not mean that Reeves is going to con audiences out of money. He may not go into great detail about how Robert Pattinson’s Bruce transforms into Batman. Nonetheless, as previously stated, Bruce’s tragic past is on full display in The Batman. To deal with the trauma of his past, this man is taking on Gotham’s most depraved criminals.
The death of his parents is likely to be the source of this long-lasting rage, and it’s a safe bet. To avoid rehashing story beats that viewers are already familiar with, the impact of this death on the world of The Batman can be explored in new ways.
