This article contains spoilers for The Batman
Those who have seen The Batman already (and they should) will be familiar with a certain cameo later in the film. Yes, it's that one. As much as the movie itself seems to want to play coy about the whole thing, not even giving the character a proper shout-out in the end credits. But most of those who saw the scene knew who they were hearing, and it turns out there was almost more.
In the latter half of The Batman, the camera cuts to a shot inside of Arkham Asylum, where the now-imprisoned Edward Nashton/Riddler (Paul Dano) resides following his capture. As he wallows in self-pity (even though this was basically part of his plan), he hears the voice of another prisoner in the cell next to his, played by Eternals star Barry Keoghan. While offering some deranged words of encouragement and flashing a glimpse of his painfully disfigured face, audiences slowly get clued into the notion that this is probably the most famous Batman villain of all, the Joker.
The Joker tease kind of calls back to Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, which similarly spent its first movie on another villain before adding a little glimpse at what's to come in the follow-up. But while this character got very little screen time, and was even credited as "Unnamed Arkham Prisoner," it turns out that there was actually more planned for him. According to The Batman director Matt Reeves during an interview with Collider, there's even a deleted scene featuring an interaction between Keoghan's proto-Joker and Robert Pattinson's own Bruce Wayne/Batman. But apparently, he didn't think the scene fit the already nearly 3-hour runtime and had to cut it.
"There is a scene that I would love the audience to see that I didn't put in. Not because anyone asked me to cut it, but because I didn’t think that within the larger narrative it worked, that it was necessary," Reeves explained in the interview. "But it's a really cool scene with that same unseen prisoner in Arkham. There was an earlier scene where Batman, because he's getting these cards and letters from the Riddler, and he's thinking, 'why is this guy writing to me? I'm supposed to be anonymous and he's putting a lens on me. I don't like that,' and so he goes to kind of profile this kind of serial killer."
"And you see him meeting with somebody who is obviously a serial killer himself, who, because it's not Batman's origin, but it is the origins of all these other characters, you're seeing a version of this character who, yes, when you see the unknown prisoner, you're like, 'well, gee, I think that's who that is.' Well, that is who that is, but he's not yet that character." It's interesting to think of how this interaction might have changed things, almost recontextualizing Batman's reaction to the Riddler's crimes. The overall story would have remained the same, but getting that extra glimpse into Bruce Wayne's internal turmoil at being rattled by this serial killer could have added a fascinating new layer of depth.
Don't worry, though. Reeves has little desire to keep that deleted scene hidden. "We're figuring out what's going to happen when everything goes into sort of the home video version of it," he assured fans, "but there's definitely a plan to do something with it. We for sure will show that scene." Looks like there are some important special features on the horizon.
The Batman is now playing in theaters.
Source: Collider