It hasn’t even been two months since The Batman opened in theaters, but along with being the highest-grossing movie of 2022 so far with its $759+ million worldwide haul, Robert Pattinson’s outing as DC Comics’ Caped Crusader has also been breaking HBO Max records over the last week. Such an exceptional performance would surely warrant a sequel being ordered, right? You’d be correct, as after rumors swirled about The Batman 2, it has finally been confirmed the sequel is moving forward.
This news comes straight from the Warner Bros. presentation at CinemaCon, with Toby Emmerich, the studio’s chairman, announcing that Robert Pattinson, writer/director Matt Reeves and “the whole team” returning for The Batman 2. Reeves also appeared on stage to say the following:
Thank you all for your tremendous support for The Batman. We couldn’t have gotten here without the faith and enthusiasm of all your teams around the world. I’m excited to jump back into this world for the next chapter.
When Toby Emmerich says “the whole team,” that surely means we’ll be seeing more of characters like Jeffrey Wright’s James Gordon and Andy Serkis’ Alfred Pennyworth. That said, I wonder if this will also apply to Zoë Kravitz’s Catwoman and Paul Dano’s Riddler, as the former left Gotham City at the end of The Batman, and the latter is now locked up in the Arkham State Hospital. It’s also unclear what this means for Colin Farrell’s Penguin, although at least we know that he’ll be starring in his own HBO Max series.
In any case, it’s nice to finally know for sure that The Batman 2 is on the way, especially after there were a lot of rumors about if we'd actually get it or not. To be fair, with Batman's decades of popularity under his belt, it would have been weird for The Batman to have been a purely standalone affair. That may have worked for Joaquin Phoenix's Joker (though there is still talk about Joker 2 possibly happening someday), but for someone like Robert Pattinson's Batman, there were clearly a lot of fans wanting to see more of him in action, to the point that The Batman 2 even trended on Twitter.
It's also worth noting that even ignoring the statistics on how well The Batman has performed, in late March, producer Dylan Clark straight up said that a sequel would arrive in “less than five years.” That didn't quite constitute official confirmation from the studio, but now we have it straight from Warner Bros' proverbial mouth mouth that this sequel is coming and a rumor no longer. Now that The Batman 2 is on the WB to-do list, it’d be nice to learn next when the sequel will be released.
Along with The Batman 2 and Colin Farrell’s Penguin show, this corner of the DC multiverse will also grow through an HBO Max series revolving around Arkham, with Matt Reeves looking to depict the iconic DC Comics location through a “haunted house” lens. There was also a GCPD series being developed that would have been set during the first year of Batman’s crimefighting career (The Batman was set in his second year), but that project has been scrapped. It remains to be seen if there will be a third spinoff series thrown into the mix.
While we wait for more news about what’s in store for The Batman 2, don’t forget that we’ll be reuniting with both Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton’s versions of Batman when The Flash races into theaters on June 23, 2023, and Keaton will return afterwards for Batgirl. For all the latest and greatest updates concerning upcoming DC movies, keep your eyes peeled on CinemaBlend.
