Two years into the never-ending mission to rid Gotham City of violence and municipal corruption, reclusive billionaire and masked vigilante Bruce Wayne realises that the vast metropolis still oozes with crime. With the mayor killed at the hands of the Riddler, a psychotic terrorist hitting corrupt high-profile targets, Bruce joins forces with Commissioner Gordon to piece clues together and take down the elusive killer obsessed with the Wayne family and Bruce himself. As Gotham's self-appointed dark knight tries to find his feet, a white-knuckle, cat-and-mouse game attracts cryptic allies and dangerous adversaries, and no one is safe from harm. But is The Batman a blessing or a curse? A friend or a foe?
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Instead of the usual sleek, gadget-laden tank, this Batmobile is a stripped-down muscle car, and that's a deliberate nod to the Neal Adams comics from the 70s, where the car was meant to look ordinary enough for stealth rather than intimidation.
Colin Farrell's prosthetics were made up of six distinct pieces glued together for every shooting day, and the crew would shine harsh flashlights directly at his face before he was allowed on set, just to make sure none of the seams were visible on camera.
While hammering out the screenplay, Reeves reportedly kept 'Thank God for the Rain' from the Taxi Driver soundtrack on loop, which tracks given how much of that film's lonely, paranoid energy bleeds into this version of Gotham.
Reeves has named three specific comics as his main touchstones for the film: Batman: Ego, Batman: The Long Halloween, and Batman: Year One, alongside 70s films Chinatown and Klute for the general mood and detective-noir feel he was chasing.
His take on the Riddler impressed DC enough that they brought him on to actually write a six-issue comic series, Riddler: Year One, exploring his own version of the character's backstory for their Black Label imprint.
Keep an eye on the convenience store that gets robbed early on, it's called 'Good Times Groceries'. That's a wink to Good Time, the 2017 Safdie Brothers film starring Pattinson, which Reeves watched and reportedly started writing this script with Pattinson already in mind for Batman.
Penguin's posh nightclub has been a staple of the comics since 1995, but this is genuinely the first time it's ever shown up on the big screen, serving as his base of operations and the movie's seediest hub of Gotham corruption.
Every big-screen Batman before this had a pointy, beak-like nose on the cowl. Pattinson's version swaps that out for a rounder nose piece, which looks a lot closer to what Adam West wore in the 1966 series, right down to the visible stitching if you look closely enough.
Alex Ferns' doomed Commissioner Pete Savage shares his surname with a character from a 1966 Batman TV series episode called 'An Egg Grows in Gotham', where Pete Savage is a descendant of one of Gotham's founding families. The characters aren't connected, but it's hard to believe Reeves picked that name by accident given his soft spot for the old show.
That now-iconic growl at the end of the train station beatdown was completely improvised by Pattinson on the day. He's said he wanted to say it right as the guy was losing consciousness, so it would burrow into his dreams and properly mess him up.
