The fact of the matter is it’s getting downright impossible to curb enthusiasm when it comes to The Batman Part II. Plenty of tasty crumbs have fallen from DC’s bread truck frequently regarding Robert Pattinson’s reprisal of Bruce Wayne under the watchful eye of James Gunn, though separate from the DCU itself, but the latest is an entire loaf, and it fell to Earth from a galaxy far, far away.
Matt Reeves, director of Pattinson’s original The Batman, is pulling out the big guns for the sequel, and not simply a paltry E-11 medium blaster rifle. He’s joined forces with Luke Hull this time around, an Emmy Award-winning production designer most recently known for his outstanding work on the Andor series.
Hull was known to construct entire sets for Andor, and magnificently so, and also earned acclaim and accolades for his work on the 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl. For the latter, he was tasked with creating an entire nuclear power plan, and that’s not a typo, folks, and it bodes exceptionally well for what awaits him in Gotham.
“I wanted to build on the fact that we’d had her embassy home in Coruscant,” he told Deadline in a 2025 sitdown, when asked about his creative drive behind Chandrila, the home planet of Senator Mon Mothma. “We had tried to make that a kind of like plastic version of Chandrila. That was their Number 10 Downing Street, or their embassy, but not their home. It was nice to be able to build on that and be like, this is the family Castle, this is their culture, this is a sort of feudal Japan meets Scandi meets Scottish Castle.”
Hearing his thought process for Chernobyl alone, in a 2019 interview with Deadline, gives insight into what’s to come for The Batman Part II, and makes it very understandable why Lucasfilm would add him to their roster of talent in 2022.
“When I read the [Chernobyl] script, what was obvious was, it had a real sense of epic, cinematic story, and that needed to be represented in design. I think the pitch I sent in for it was very ambitious, but it kind of grew from that, and production, HBO, and [executive producer] Carolyn Strauss were extremely supportive of that idea. They actually did a lot more than I think they originally had set out to do, in terms of what we recreated for the power plant, and how we would tell that story. But it’s such a complicated thing to explain that you wouldn’t want to cut too many corners.”
He went on to explain how, and please try to take this the correct way, size doesn’t always matter, at least not as it pertains to constructing an entire Hollywood set — his explanation giving a rare look into the mind of Andor’s genius production designer.
“It’s not necessarily about scale, in terms of big sets. It’s just about explaining the scale of the disaster, the scale of the power plant, the scale of the effect on the people. That needed to be put on the screen. Then, obviously, there were all these technical discussions on how we might approach and achieve that.”
Gotham is Batman, Batman is Gotham
Courtesy of MovieStillsDB
One of the biggest draws to Batman, the character himself, is environment, and that’s rarely been more true than in The Batman franchise. The arc of the Caped Crusader, across many variations and storylines, often remains rooted in the dark aura and sinister dealings of Gotham City, and that’s something that isn’t true of every DC hero. Granted, Aquaman has Atlantis, The Flash and Arrow have Central City and Star City, respectively, and Superman has Metropolis, but the latter is fighting injustice all over the globe (and cosmos) far more frequently than he defends the perimeter of the Daily Planet.
But as it relates to Bruce Wayne, one could argue there is simply no separating the aura of his character from that of Gotham (hell, even the TV series was named that and no one thought any less of it), so successfully getting Hull to tap in for its production design was a master stroke by Matt Reeves, and one stellar enough to make even the Rebel Alliance proud.
Release Date
March 4, 2022
Runtime
176 minutes
Director
Matt Reeves
Writers
Matt Reeves, Peter Craig, Bob Kane, Bill Finger
Robert Pattinson
Bruce Wayne / The Batman
