The Batman Sequel Delayed a Year
Battinson is going to be waiting in his cave a little while longer. The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that the sequel to The Batman (which appears to no longer be called The Batman: Part II) has been pushed back a full year – minus a day – from its October 2, 2026 release date; it will now storm into theaters in a generic used car it calls the Batmobile on October 1, 2027. The reason for this appears to be twofold; while James Gunn, the co-CEO of Warner Bros.’ new production company DC Studios, says it’s because the script isn’t finished yet, THR notes that the previous release date has been filled by another Warner Bros. production, an untitled film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and starring Tom Cruise. The Batman was released in 2022, meaning there will have been a five-year gap when the sequel debuts, assuming it isn’t delayed again, although there was a similar hiatus between The Batman and the film he made before that, War for the Planet of the Apes. This year, a spin-off HBO series, The Penguin, aired to much acclaim.
My feelings on the delay aren’t that interesting: I don’t care. I didn’t like The Batman, and while I unexpectedly loved The Penguin, I’m not all that interested in the sequel. I’m much more interested in the movie taking its place, which was announced in February. This is part of Tom Cruise’s deal with Warner Bros., which saw him create a production office on the WB lot. The deal is for “original and franchise theatrical films,” which Cruise will star in and produce. This one with Alejandro González Iñárritu is the first to come out of that deal, which makes sense because Cruise said he wanted to use his Warner Bros. deal to work with auteurs. Iñárritu certainly fits that bill; he’s the director of excellent films like Birdman and The Revenant, and he sounds like the exact kind of filmmaker Tom Cruise would seek out in between Mission: Impossible movies. The plot of the film sounds intriguing as well, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Cruise, Iñárritu, and the writers (two of whom wrote Birdman with Iñárritu) cook up. Here’s the synopsis:
“The most powerful man in the world causes a disaster and embarks on a mission to prove that he is the savior of humanity.”
That interests me much more than another slow, pretentious, hyper-realistic, look-how-serious-we-are Batman movie from Matt Reeves. And while I imagine it’s true that the Cruise- Iñárritu film is closer to being ready for production, I’m not sure I completely buy that as the reason behind the delay. WorldClassBullshitters posted about Warner Bros. pushing back the sequel to The Batman on X, and it suggests something a little different:
This is how you kill interest in sequels pic.twitter.com/om168hAFGD
— WorldClassBS (@TheWorldClassBS) December 27, 2024
Now, Jeff and the guys may have been talking about the folly of waiting so long to capitalize on a successful franchise movie, but it made me think that maybe James Gunn is trying to end the Matt Reeves Batman universe. Look at, for example, how he undercut the last remaining DCEU films by announcing his DCU just before they were released, effectively telling audiences they don’t matter. Look how he and co-CEO Peter Safran strung along actors like Jason Momoa and Gal Gadot, getting them to play nice till they were out of the picture. (Was this a lesson he learned from the blowback following his dismissal of Henry Cavill?) He’s not above using subterfuge to clear the decks for the DCU, and regardless of all the Elseworlds stuff he’s said is okay, a rival Batman series can’t be good for The Brave and the Bold. (Neither can Damian Wayne, but that’s another conversation.) I think this could be at least partly a way of getting The Batman: Part II out of the way, either by setting it up to fail/underperform or by at least taking it out of the conversation in 2025, when Gunn’s Superman will arrive. Suppose the DCU version of Batman makes his first appearance in Superman; it’d be a huge reveal, even more so if Gunn manages to keep it a surprise, and getting some distance from Reeves’ films would allow it to excite people for Gunn’s (and Andy Muschietti’s) Batman. I’m speculating, of course, and maybe it really is taking this long to put together a sequel to The Batman for mundane reasons (Robert Pattinson is about to film another Christopher Nolan movie), but given the DC Studios turmoil over the last couple of years, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more to the delay.
Let us know what you think of the sequel to The Batman being delayed in the comments!
***
If you want to know what kind of political leanings movies have or just talk about cinema, check out the movie ratings community Criticless.
Get Your Geeks + Gamers merch here!
