The end of Batman Begins included a tease in which James Gordon (Gary Oldman) informs Batman (Christian Bale) about a criminal who leaves behind Joker playing cards. Of course, the next film memorably brought the Joker (Health Ledger) into the spotlight. Why do I bring this up? Well, fans are well aware that the Joker turns up at the end of The Batman, but director Matt Reeves says that the scene wasn’t included to set up a sequel.
The Clown Prince of Crime (Barry Keoghan) shows up at the end of The Batman to befriend Riddler (Paul Dano) at Arkham, but in the director’s commentary for the film, Matt Reeves explained that it was more about concluding Riddler’s arc than setting up the Joker.
A lot of people ask me, ‘Is this a set up for another movie?’ and to be honest it really isn’t. This for me was tracking because Paul and The Riddler was in the action of the third act in a very particular way, and the last we’d seen him he was saying ‘Boom!’ in his window as the bombs went off, and we hadn’t yet seen him take in the fact that Batman had been able to pull things back from the brink and that his plan had not played out, I really wanted to see the end of that arc for Riddler.
Matt Reeves continued, “By not having this scene, not only did you not get to see what I think is a fantastic performance from both actors, from Barry and from Paul here and when Paul starts laughing after Barry does I find it so delightful, and it was a great texture change and a tonal change from what is a sort of painful ending to the movie.” This certainly doesn’t mean that Barry Keoghan won’t show up as the Joker in a sequel to The Batman, but Matt Reeves said that the cameo “was never meant to be an Easter egg scene, to say like, ‘Oh guess who we’re using in the next movie.’ It was meant to be something delicious for the audience to sort of experience those two characters meeting, and in fact for the Unseen Prisoner to say to him, ‘Riddle me this,’ which is of course right out of ‘Batman’ 66.” The Batman is now streaming on HBO Max.