So, currently the whole Batman movie franchise is kinda deadish. So I figure it’s time for a reboot.
And I figure that if you just release another dark gravelly voiced Batman it won’t stand out against it’s previous incarnations.
So what I think is it should be more along the lines of if a comic book from the 80s, met with the 90s animated show…except it’s live action. But the camera framing, and Batman’s personality are more comic book than theatrical. Even in the 1989 Batman, he was posing, and doing movie stuff.
This would be a movie where the city itself is dark and brooding, Batman is dark and brooding, but the rest of the elements of the movie are not.
The story would actually center around Commisioner Gordon. He’s trying to work together with attorney Harvey Dent in prosecuting Selina Kyle…a high level cat burglar who was caught stealing a priceless diamomd necklace.
But during their meeting bullets reign on the windows of the office. Gordon and Dent duck behind the desk, and avoid any fatal injuries. And that’s when a bomb is thrown into the room. They try to run out of the room, and Gordon escapes, but Dent is badly burned on half his body.
Every cop in the building pours out of the building, guns drawn to find no one. The only thing they find is a burning red flag thats held on the door by a knife.
And that’s the basis of the film. Gordon trying to do his job, and occasionally meeting up with Batman, but is being targeted by an unknown assasin who keeps intentionally not killing Gordon, but leaving behind two things. The first is the transformation of a new super villain (so we see the rise of the penguin, two-face, catwoman, bane) but also a burning red flag stabbed onto a nearby surface with a knife. Never any finger prints.
Gordon is INSISTANT that this is the work of the Joker, and has his cell at Arkham Asylum placed under extra security. And everytime he’s shown video evidence of Joker not only not leaving his cell, but also having a minimum of 20 eye witnesses at all times. Despite Gordons insistance, it WASN’T Joker.
Batman knows it’s not Joker. Joker would target innocent civilians. Use them as hostages. Whoever is targeting Gordon is being very deliberate.
At the same time, all of these new super villains are causing chaos for Batman. He’s having to go stop Two-Face, and Riddler, and Mr Freeze, and Bane, and Penguin…and all these other super villains that are coming from the aftermath of various attempts to kill Gordon in a way that feel deliberately failed.
So while Batman is off fighting those villains, we pop in from time to time to see his fights, but our perspective is with Gordon. He is trying to get a handle on things, and that’s who we follow.
The whole thing feels like a game of chess. Just to get Gordon into positions that are more and more vunerable. Easier to attack him from every angle. Making it more obvious by the minute that he doesn’t even know who his attacker is, but he’s so exposed that the lethal blow could come from any angle, at any moment, without warning. Still Gordon presses on.
Thats when Batman swoops in, grabs him, and swoops him to a far away safety. Up high in the shadows. In the rafters of an industrial plant.
Gordon is scared out of his mind, but says they must press on. They must find the man trying to kill him, and cause chaos in the city. That’s when Batmsn says “But Commisioner…you’ve already found him.” And pushes Gordon off the ledge, into a vat of acid below. Then swings off crashing through the window, as the building explodes.
Fade to black. To be continued.
And the second movie, would retell all of those events from Batmans perspective. We’d see him fight all those fights we missed out on. And in the end, we’d see Batman stalk the assasin, and realize that the reason he was targeting Gordon so much was to distract the city resources from prosecuting criminals. This guy was hired by a mob boss, who was sick of his low level crime thwarted. So the mob boss was able to take blood of batman from previous encounters with the joker, and clone his DNA. Essentially creating a clone Batman. But instead of dressing like Batman, he just posseses Batmans traits. Such as athletism, and dectective work. He is every bit as skilled and intelligent as Batman. Wearing all black, with a red cape. And to leave a calling card,he rips off his cape, stabs it to a nearby wall, and sets it on fire.
Batman figures out the only way to get this guy to come out of hiding is to fake Gordons death. So he swoops Gordon into an industrial plant, pushes Gordon off the ledge into a vat of acid, and leaps out before this red cape blows the building up. What red cape never sees is Gordon submerged in the vat of acid. He only sees Batman and Gordon go in, but only Batman come out. The acid isn’t harmful at all, and saves Gordon. But from his perdpective, Batman is his attempted killer.
This leads to a fight scene with red cape and Batman. Maybe on some rooftops. You see the fight end when red cape falls to his death.
It’s only after the media report on what happened that Gordon speaks to Batman again.
And when asked why Batman tricked him, Batman tells Gordon “I needed you dead. But more importantly, I needed you safe. If anyone, even you, knew that you were working with me, the attacks would have continued. With you dead, and also afraid of me, I knew you’d go into hiding, and thus not seen.”
That’s when they leave the alley, only to see in the distance a red burning cape, stabbed onto a wall.
Fade to black.
I come to the Batman community, to pitch a Batman movie, and am told there’s too much Batman in the world. What am I doing wrong?
Ya know, I’ve said it before, but I truely don’t understand the world around me. I haven’t heard of this Penguin show…but also I thought the last movie Batman was in was a few years ago, and universally hated.
Is it not time for a reboot?
The Batman (2022) came out a couple years ago and according to IMDb it received a 7.8/10. I wouldn’t necessarily call that universally hated.
The Penguin show is a spin-off from that movie.
And the whole “it’s been a couple years since a Batman (or any other superhero) movie, time for a reboot!” Is one of the issues why we have so many superhero movies to begin with. People get confused between storylines and such. It gets to be too much for a lot of people.
Edit: a quick count in Wikipedia put me at 26 Batman films, not including the direct-to-video animated ones (of which there are a lot) or things including Batman as an ensemble character (there’s also a ton of those too). And there’s a The Batman Part 2 coming in the next couple years as well, as a direct sequel to 2022’s The Batman. Batman fans have literally never gone starving.