Like many other Batman fanatics out there, I’m not exactly over the moon knowing the entirety of 2026 will pass without the Caped Crusader showing up in live-action. (2025 at least had Jason Bateman in the Batsuit, for better or worse.) Without any clear answers about when James Gunn will bring Bruce Wayne into the DCU, the only port to look forward to in this dismal storm is Matt Reeves’ long-awaited sequel The Batman: Part II. Updates have been slow-going but co-writer Mattson Tomlin’s latest comments sent my optimism soaring.
Tomlin has already been quite busy on social media in the aftermath of Netflix cancelling Terminator Zero after one season, which he’s been refreshingly candid and open-minded about, both with his own thoughts and in replies to followers. That same level of earnestness was reflected in his comments about efforts made when scripting The Batman’s sequel with Reeves (which he's getting credit for this time). As he put it on X:
We worked exceptionally hard to tell a story worthy of the character. Something that feels new and dangerous. The bar couldn't be higher. Looking forward to people seeing it and being able to talk about it at length. Can't begin to describe what this film means to me.
Comments like those are exactly what fans should hope to hear from the minds concocting this and any other IP-driven scripts. Plus, Mattson Tomlin can somewhat uniquely boast having previously told an excellent Batman story outside of these movies. He wrote DC Black Label’s excellent Batman: The Imposter, with his dark and gritty story capitalized on by artist Andrea Sorrentino and colorist Jordie Bellaire. So I can both believe and believe in Tomlin’s comments, since he’s got a vested interest that speaks to more than box office receipts.
(He also wrote and directed 2012's darkly comedic thriller Solomon Grundy, but that was about an invisible friend that won't go away, and wasn't a before-its-time DC villain movie.)
Bringing in a billion dollars at the box office will likely be the easiest way for Warner Bros. to greenlight another movie in this side-verse for Tomlin to potentially take on, so that’s certainly part of the “bar” that he hopes this follow-up film leaps over in a single bound. (Wait, wrong guy.) After a five-year wait, Matt Reeves could have co-written The Batman: Part II with Guy Fieri and fans would turn up in droves, but the added talents of someone on Tomlin’s level could be what gets those fans back for second and third screenings.
The Project Power creator also shared this excitement-stoking declaration, saying:
We did our actual, literal, pushed beyond the limit best.
How often does anyone in the film industry say, "I tried my best," at this point without immediately qualifying that statement with a dozen other points? And within that number, how many of them are being honest? It's impossible to know, and it'd be silly to try and figure it out. Instead, I'm gonna put a Flying Graysons-amount of faith in the sentiment that The Batman: Part II won't let any of us fall to our deaths. Er, our disappointments, rather.
The Batman: Part II will (hopefully) swoop menacingly into theaters on October 1, 2027, presumably after several more Batman-free movies from James Gunn’s DCU are released, from Supergirl to Clayface. Anybody else kinda hoping Sony & Co. call Tomlin up to hear out his Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movie pitch regardless of how Bats does?
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