Everyone can now experience The Batman from home and with that comes access to loads of behind-the-scenes clips and of course the director’s commentary. The Wrap reported on highlights from Apple’s exclusive Matt Reeves commentary track, which has given more context as to why the film closed on the Riddler (Paul Dano) and the Joker’s (Barry Keoghan) meet-cute over Gotham domination.
“This for me was tracking because the Riddler was in the action of the third act in a very particular way, and the last we’d seen him he was saying ‘Boom!’ in his window as the bombs went off,” Reeves said. “We hadn’t yet seen him take in the fact that Batman had been able to pull things back from the brink and that his plan had not played out, I really wanted to see the end of that arc for Riddler.” Having this button doesn’t distract as much as Mistah J appearing earlier would have.
“By not having this scene, not only did you not get to see what I think is a fantastic performance from both actors, from Barry and from Paul here and when Paul starts laughing after Barry does I find it so delightful, and it was a great texture change and a tonal change from what is a sort of painful ending to the movie,” Reeves said of its importance. “That in this moment of the power vacuum that people are already scheming. When you took this scene out it didn’t have that sort of same resonance. That was critical, actually, to the ending of the movie and to the finishing of the Riddler’s arc as well.”
By no means is the ending some sort of huge villain set up for the Joker, who’s not fully the Joker; instead, it creates connections between Batman’s rogues’ gallery: “What we’ll do with these characters in the future remains to be seen, but it was never meant to be an Easter egg scene, to say like, ‘Oh guess who we’re using in the next movie.’ It was meant to be something delicious for the audience to sort of experience those two characters meeting, and in fact for the Unseen Prisoner to say to him, ‘Riddle me this,’ which is of course right out of Batman ‘66.”
The Batman is now available on HBO Max and on various streaming platforms, including Apple.
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