Matt Reeves Wants to Take a Cue From the ‘Planet of the Apes’ Series and Make Batman More ‘Emotional’
Matt Reeves has a pretty intimidating task ahead of him with The Batman: He’ll have to fill the shoes that Ben Affleck himself almost wore as director, and he’ll also have to make a solo superhero film that stacks up against Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman, which has bested all four of its DCEU predecessors at the domestic box office. He already has a few plans up his sleeve, one of which is to make it more like Planet of the Apes.
Reeves’ other movie, War for the Planet of the Apes, is about to hit theaters this month, and he recently told Yahoo UK that he’ll use some of what he’s learned from working on that movie for his Batman solo joint.
It’s my hope to tell a very emotional Batman story and I do see a very strong parallel between [Batman and Caesar] because they’re both damaged characters who are grappling to the do the right thing in a very imperfect world. A world that’s filled with all of the corruption that is human.
He also praised Christopher Nolan’s version of the character and says he admires how “seriously” Nolan took the character
What I love that [Nolan] did was that he took the genre seriously. What studios are willing to make at the moment is a very, very narrow band of films. What I discovered is that this genre has the potential to be about something more. You can use the metaphors of the genre to talk about [a lot]. I think that the metaphors of both of the franchises [Batman and Apes] enable you to tell stories that have deep emotional resonance. That’s actually what excites me about it. It’s interesting because I was obsessed with both as a child, and yet there is something potentially very adult about what you can explore under the cover of that fantasy. That is what draws me to it, and that’s what I’m excited about.
Okay, neat, so The Batman is going to have a lot of metaphors. Honestly, at this point, anything’s better than “Martha.” And maybe, since the Apes films are remarkably good, for a series of movies involving chimps on horseback shooting automatic rifles at today’s finest character actors, Reeves will know what to do to with this version of the dark knight.