Michael Keaton is reportedly in “early talks with Warner Bros. to reprise his role as Batman in the upcoming DC film The Flash, reports The Wrap. The long-gestating film is set to premiere in the summer of 2022.
The Flash is part of the newer slate of DC films to come out of the company’s Expanded Universe franchise that included Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League, Wonder Woman, Shazam!, and Aquaman. It’ll be loosely based off of the crossover comic series Flashpoint, in which Barry Allen (reprised by Ezra Miller) tries to change the past when his mother died. The film will be directed by Andrés Muschietti (It and It: Chapter Two).
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According to The Wrap, Keaton will return to the franchise as a way to explain the DC franchise’s multiverse concept, something that’s familiar to fans of the comics. The concept is that all of the various adaptations of DC properties are connected because they’re part of a multiverse, and thus, if you travel from one parallel universe to another, you could have characters from various films and TV shows meet one another in a way that remains canon. Keaton played the caped crusader in 1989’s Batman and 1992’s Batman Returns, and The Wrap notes that the film will essentially ignore 1995’s Batman Forever and Batman & Robin in that particular continuity.
Most recently, The CW’s Arrowverse has put the DC multiverse to use with its own franchise of DC properties, using its latest crossover event, Crisis on Infinite Earths to pull in a number of actors from prior DC adaptations, including Burt Ward from Batman, Tom Welling and Erica Durance from Smallville, Brandon Routh from Superman Returns, Tom Ellis from Lucifer, and The Flash‘s Miller. If it happens, Keaton would be the latest example to be part of this project.
Huh.
This…definitely has potential if done right.
Dude. Duuuuude. I will forgive Batman and Robin if we can somehow get Keaton, Kilmer and Clooney all in the same film.
You mean Ezra Miller right?
If they are actually following Crisis‘s lead in depicting past screen continuities as a multiverse, I wonder if that’s why the studio asked the Arrowverse producers to work in Miller’s cameo in Crisis. Wouldn’t it be amazing if that Flash-meets-Flash scene were actually reprised in the feature film? Unlikely, but it’d be cool.
The world of Keaton’s Batman was glimpsed in Crisis as Earth-89, represented by Robert Wuhl reprising Alexander Knox — and reading a headline about Batman capturing the Joker, suggesting that reports of Jack Napier’s demise were exaggerated. (Of course, coming back from seemingly certain death has been a Joker trademark since the early 1940s.)
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Wouldn’t it be amazing if that Flash-meets-Flash scene were actually reprised in the feature film? Unlikely, but it’d be cool.
I’d been wondering about that, too.
It’s likely impractical, but it’d a nice touch if they can find a way of justifying its inclusion.
At this point Mr Michael Keaton’s Batman is probably at the point of prepping Helena – Wayne or Bertinelli? You decide! – to take over for him; it will be interesting to see how Mr Keaton’s Batman has aged, though I’m rather sorry that they seem to be cutting out the Schumacher films entirely (hopefully the version of the Caped Crusader* who enjoyed those adventures has been doing his own thing in some other corner of the Multiverse).
*Definitely not the Dark Knight!
I certainly like the idea of using The Flash to establish & explore a cinematic DC multiverse – after all, as time-tested classics go to show that’s what a Flash is FOR. (-;
p.s. Not going to lie, this only increases my wild, desperate hopes of seeing every single Batman actor they can lay their hands on joining in a mighty chorus of ‘Na-na-na-na BATMAN!’ at some future point. (-:
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Anyway, I forgot to add last night that if the film is adapting Flashpoint, and given the timeline reboot elements of the story, then that theoretically gives Warner Brothers their own X-Men: Days of Future Past and would allow them to do a soft reboot of the DCEU and fix anything that needs fixing (or to explain casting changes like Wayne and Gordon in The Batman).
@6/ED: I don’t think bringing Keaton back rules out the Schumacher films being in the same timeline, any more than recasting Jim Rhodes puts the first Iron Man in an alternate universe. Different actors can play the same character — just look at Catwoman or Mr. Freeze in the ’66 show. (One could easily theorize that there were at least two different Catwomen, but no way would three different people suffer the same freak cryogenic accident.) And all four films were nominally meant to share a reality; they had the same Alfred and Commissioner Gordon, and Catwoman was referenced in one of the Schumacher films.
Granted, nothing rules out that they’re in a different reality either. But it’s not a given.
There are several cases where a role has been recast in a series and then the original actor returned in a later installment. This happened with Cornelius in Planet of the Apes, with Roddy McDowall being replaced by David Watson in the second film but returning for the third. Ditto for Judith Hoag and Paige Turco as April O’Neil in the ’90s Ninja Turtles trilogy. It happened in the Pink Panther/Inspector Clouseau series with two characters — Alan Arkin replaced Peter Sellers as Clouseau in the largely forgotten third film, but Sellers returned for the remainder of the series, as did David Niven as Sir Charles Lytton, who’d been played by Christopher Plummer in his second appearance. On TV, it happened with the daughter Becky in Roseanne. Oh, and the Riddler in Batman, with Frank Gorshin returning after being replaced by John Astin in one instance.
Maybe you could count Sarah Connor, except that the Sarah in Genisys was meant to be a younger version, so it doesn’t quite count. And I don’t think Bela Lugosi returning to Dracula in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein really counts, since that can’t really be said to be the same continuity. It’s more like George Lazenby’s cameo as “JB” in The Return of the Man from UNCLE.
@9. ChristopherLBennett: What you say is entirely true, but based on a misconception – I based my remark about BATMAN FOREVER & BATMAN AND ROBIN being cut out on the text of the original article, rather than my own hypotheses.
Quite frankly I’d be perfectly happy to conflate the Burton/Schumacher Batmen, since it allows us to trace an interesting arc for the character and his city (going from ‘Hell grown out of the pavement’ to ‘Holy Neon Batman!’ must have been quite a trip for Gotham Citizens; it would be interesting to see a take on Modern Earth-89 that borrowed elements of both with a 2000s twist).
@10/ED: Hmm, I see. Much like how Superman Returns ignored everything after Superman II, or how various sequels in franchises like Friday the 13th, Halloween, Highlander, Alien/Predator, and Terminator have ignored poorly-received installments.
So I guess the new model would be that the Keaton films are Earth-89 and the Schumacher films are a similar but distinct parallel world (Earth-95?) with exact doppelgangers for Alfred Pennyworth and James Gordon but distinct incarnations of Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent. (Also the Halle Berry Catwoman would be on Earth-89, because it referenced Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle as one of the previous inheritors of the Catwoman powers.)