‘The Batman’ Was 25 Percent Shot When Production Shut Down
We’ve already gotten several official images and videos from the set of Matt Reeves’ The Batman. You might think that means that the production was very far along by the time that it was shut down by the coronavirus pandemic. But Reeves told Deadline that’s not the case. In fact, he says, “we’ve actually shot a quarter of the movie.” That leaves a lot of movie still to shoot, and no end in sight to the lockdowns and quarantines that are preventing The Batman, along with basically every Hollywood production on the planet, from moving forward.
In the meantime, Reeves told Deadline he’s looking at the dailies of what he’s shot so far. He’s not making any changes to the movie’s story (“It took me two years to work on that story, and it’s a very specific mystery noir that’s been really thought-out by me and my partners.”) but what he is doing is reconsidering “the tone of things.”
He continued:
I would say that the changes really have to do with ‘Oh, seeing the tone of this’ with these scenes we haven’t done which connect to that part of the storyline. It feels like there might be an opportunity to explore some of that unexpected tone that we found. With these movies, you never have enough prep time, because they’re so complex and so enormous in so many ways.
Reeves also noted that the downtime is also giving him extra space to prep for the “larger sequences that have yet to come up” and think about he will “realize those.”
When all is said and done, and the film is finished, it will be fascinating to revisit this topic with Reeves. That’s when we’ll be able to see exactly what got changed during this hiatus, and whether those changes were beneficial to the movie. The Batman is currently scheduled to open in theaters on June 25, 2021.
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