When Christopher Nolan made the decision to base his version of Batman squarely in something resembling the real world, it meant certain elements of Batman-lore had to be discarded.
Out went Lazarus Pits and villains like Man Bat and Clayface. No Killer Croc or Solomon Grundy.
After the DCEU leaned back into some of that, Matt Reeves’ The Batman went back to a more reality-based approach.
There was no beak and webbed hands for his version of The Penguin.
In an interview with SFX Magazine about the sequel, and how the upcoming Penguin series fits into this universe, Reeves confirmed that the more fantasy-based villains won’t be in his movies:
“What was important to me was to find a way to take these pop icons, these mythic characters that everybody knows, and translate it so that Gotham feels like a place in our world. We might push to the edge of fantastical, but we would never go into full fantastical. It’s meant to feel quite grounded.
So nothing but the Calendar Killer and Harvey Dent, then?
“It doesn’t mean that you won’t see characters that people love. That’s exactly what we want to do. Gentleman Ghost is probably pushed a bit too far for us to be able to find a way to do, but there is a fun way to think about how we would take characters that might push over into a bit of the fantastical and find a way to make sense of that.”
Reeves also talked about what the focus of the second movie will be:
“It’s going to dig into the epic story about deeper corruption and it goes into places [Bruce Wayne] couldn’t even anticipate in the first one.
The seeds of where this goes are all in the first movie, and it expands in a way that will show you aspects of the character you never got to see. Batman is constantly battling these forces. But those forces can’t be entirely exorcised. So the next movie delves deeper into that.”
He also re-confirmed that The Penguin series on Max is key to some of this. It will peel back the layers and show why Gotham is the way it is, and how this lets corruption take hold.