Posted in: Batman, Movies, Warner Bros | Tagged: movies, the batman, Warner Bros

My 15 Minutes In Heaven With The Batman [SPOILERS]

This weekend, The Batman dropped into theaters after an uphill battle against changing stars, tone, scripts, directors, and COVID-19. We try to remain as spoiler-free as possible here at Bleeding Cool so you, as a fan, can make a choice as to whether or not you'd like to interact with spoilers. So this is your warning that we will be talking about serious spoilers for the end of The Batman. If you haven't seen the movie yet and you want to remain spoiler-free, now is the moment to click off of this article [that has a fantastic headline, thank you, Jeremy Konrad] and come back when you've seen the movie. If you don't care about spoilers before you see a movie, please don't be a jerk in the comments or social media posts and ruin this for everyone. When it comes to spoilers, choice is the key here, and we're trying to give people a choice. Final SPOILER WARNING if you don't want to be spoiled, don't look beyond this image.

"Unmask the truth" is the line that has been going through the marketing and in the movie itself for The Batman. The idea of people presenting themselves as one way and acting another is the entire point of exposing the corrupt men in power and, eventually in a move that was a nice change of pace, exposing the Wayne family as not the perfect rich people Bruce, or we thought they were. The movie is building and building, and there are about fifteen minutes where you think that this movie is going to do something a Batman movie hasn't ever done before; unmask Batman.

As someone who had a lot of thoughts about The Batman, and most of them were not positive, those fifteen minutes were the best fifteen minutes in the entire movie. Why is Batman exempt from this truth if we're unmasking the truth? They already had to come up with entirely contrived reasons why, say, the police didn't remove the mask when Bruce was in the station. The Batman that we end this movie with is a vastly different Batman than we've seen before. This is a Batman that appears to be more on the same page with not only the public but the police as well than previous iterations of the character.

Those fifteen minutes were the moments when The Batman looked like it was going to make that massive swing. They already did something new and different with the Wayne family; why not go in this direction? Why not explore a world where everyone knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman and see what that is like on the big screen? That is a new and exciting direction for the series to explore, and it would have been one that truly set this Batman apart from the Michael Keaton or Ben Affleck versions of the character. Yet despite this perfect opportunity to tie into the movie thematically and do something truly unique with the character, The Batman kept Bruce under the cowl, and it is worse for it.

For those fifteen minutes of heaven, though, it looked like The Batman was going to be truly unique, truly explore a new direction that we haven't seen from this character before. But then they backed out in what felt like the eleventh hour. Perhaps there is a version of the script where Bruce is unmasked, and that was when they thought this movie was going to be a one-and-done type of thing, but they back peddled with the spin-offs in development. The thematic tie-in feels too deliberate to be a mistake. Now, however, there are spin-offs, and we'll probably get an official sequel greenlight sometime next week, and exploring those worlds with an unmasked Bruce isn't what DC or Warner Bros. wanted to do. Maybe the sequel will explore that territory, but they can't exactly do the "unmask the truth" motif again. There are a lot of missed opportunities in The Batman, but this one feels particularly egregious. Then again, this franchise has a pattern of the sequels being better than the first one, so maybe they can turn it around, at least for this writer.

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