Batman Part II suspends production as director Matt Reeves steps away
The already delayed Batman sequel with Robert Pattinson has paused filming after its director Matt Reeves had to step away.
The long, long, long-awaited Batman sequel is on pause after director Matt Reeves stepped away for “family reasons”.
It’s unclear if Reeves will return to set or if he will be replaced with a different person. The statement from the studio emphasised that Reeves “had the full support of DC Studios and we look forward to continuing the journey soon”, which left the door open for either scenario.
DC Studios bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran have been confirmed to keep their jobs with the merger of parent company Warner Bros with Paramount due to complete today.
Sign up to The Nightly's newsletters.
Get the first look at the digital newspaper, curated daily stories and breaking headlines delivered to your inbox.
By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.The suspension in filming for The Batman Part II is the latest delay for the sequel which is currently dated for release in February 2028.
If it sticks to that date, it will be six years on since The Batman, which relaunched the iconic comic book franchise with Reeves at the helm and Robert Pattinson in the suit, premiered in March 2022. It grossed $US770 million in cinemas worldwide.
The sequel was announced within weeks but it took several months for a deal to be signed with Reeves in the wake of an earlier merger in 2022 between Warner Bros and Discovery. The script went through several stages of rewrites.
Filming was supposed to start in 2023 with a release slated for 2025. Script delays and the 2023 Hollywood strikes pushed production back further.
Finally, The Batman Part II had started filming in London in July, with Pattinson returning in the title role, along with Jeffrey Wright, Andy Serkis, and Colin Farrell, and joined by newcomers to the franchise Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan and Charles Dance.
The story is supposed to pick up a few weeks after the events of the spin-off series The Penguin, and will follow another case of corruption in Gotham City.
The demanding filming schedule meant Pattinson was only able to step out for 24 hours to attend the premiere of another project, Primetime, at the Venice Film Festival because it was a relatively quick hop from the UK to Italy.
Pattinson wasn’t able to attend the North American premieres and has done little press for Primetime.
The Reeves Batman movies function as standalone stories in the wider DC Studios continuity, meaning they don’t connect to Gunn’s Superman movies nor the Lanterns TV show.
Batman has had many lives on the small and large screen. Notable versions include the Adam West TV show of the 1960s, the 1989 to 1997 movies, originally with Tim Burton and Michael Keaton (Val Kilmer and George Clooney then took over the role), the Christian Bale-led trilogy from Christopher Nolan, and then with Ben Affleck under Zack Snyder.
Snyder’s tenure in charge of the character was marred after he stepped away from the production of Justice League due to a family tragedy. Joss Whedon was hired to complete the film, and the result was critically derided.
Snyder was later allowed to release a director’s cut on streaming after a vociferous campaign from online fan communities, although The Wrap and Rolling Stone investigations suggested bot farms had been harnessed to ramp up the pressure.
Fans will be hoping Reeves can return to finish the film, and perhaps finish out the planned trilogy, even if it has already taken longer than expected just to get to this point.
Stan, while promoting a different project earlier this week said, “It’s a very ambitious thing, and I hope it lands right. I have a lot of faith in it, because I just do feel like (Reeves) is truly a genius of our time, and one of the very few people that I think is so unique and so specific.
“And he has been at this for three years. It’s not an accident, he knows what he’s doing, and I’m just so happy to be part of that vision.”
