Caution: Spoilers Ahead for The Batman
fundamentally misunderstood Batman’s endless crusade against crime and created a thin-feeling ending.
With the release of The Batman, Robert Pattinson marks the third actor in under a decade to portray the Caped Crusader in live-action on the big screen. Zoë Kravitz is now the second actress to portray Catwoman in the same window of time. Seeing the two characters appear again in live-action so soon created the opportunity to address disappointing elements from recent portrayals. Especially for a crimefighter in his infancy like Pattinson’s Batman, the choice to keep the characters separate at the film’s conclusion proved particularly effective.
Unlike The Dark Knight Rises, The Batman allows for Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne and Zoë Kravitz’s Selina Kyle to continue as Batman and Catwoman separately at its conclusion. In many ways, their departure from a Gotham cemetery near the movie’s end proves more cathartic than the finale of The Dark Knight Rises. This will allow Catwoman—one of the most well-received characters in The Batman—to embrace the various parts of her relationship with Batman in any future sequels, creating a welcome uncertainty whether she will be an opponent, lover, or ally should she return.
One of the strengths of the portrayals of Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle in The Batman is that the movie focuses on both of their relationships with their parents, deceased and still living. While Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman fit well into the world of Nolan’s trilogy, her appearance in the final act of the trilogy led to her character feeling like an afterthought in the broader narrative. This will not be the case with Kravitz’s Catwoman, who will have the opportunity to grow and change alongside Pattinson’s Batman and act as a foil to him in any sequel appearances or potential HBO Max spinoffs.
While it remains to be seen how Zoe Kravitz’s Catwoman will play into the future of Matt Reeves' budding Batman universe, the tension that the ending of The Batman left audiences with is a great place to leave the characters going forward. While DC has struggled to create any cinematic universes as streamlined and interconnected as Marvel, movies like The Batman prove that their approach has a different set of rewards. These include the ability to begin a new continuity with two new portrayals of iconic characters, who will hopefully continue to astound us.
