The actor who marries box office ratings with Wes Anderson cool should revive the Batman series, but trying to guess who she might play is a thankless task
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or years the follow-up to Matt Reeves’ slick but glacially paced 2022 comic-book epic The Batman has existed in a dimly lit rumour void. We know it will eventually get here (supposedly in October 2027), but nobody knows quite what it will look like. Entire geological epochs may come and go before the film-maker finally decides which doyen of Batman’s infamous rogues’ gallery he wants to unleash next. The foundations of Gotham itself may shift before Reeves works out which brooding, rain-soaked grunge ditty will form the basis of the new soundtrack.
And then – out of nowhere – comes this week’s news that Scarlett Johansson is in final talks to join the cast of the sequel. We have no idea who she’s likely to play but it matters not: this feels consequential, a bat-signal flickering to life over a city long abandoned. Johansson is more than just an A-lister; she’s one of the few actors who still puts bums on seats and appears in Wes Anderson movies. She retains a veneer of golden-era Hollywood cool that feels exactly right.
What does her involvement tell us? In years past, the media might have mocked up images of Johansson as Poison Ivy or Harley Quinn, but neither is particularly likely to show up. First there’s The Batman itself, which was one of the more orthodox and street-level big-screen outings. Not for Reeves a shared universe in which superheroes and villains exist alongside the Dark Knight’s more homegrown nemeses: this will be left for Andy Muschietti’s Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which – unlike the Battinson movies – will exist within James Gunn’s mainstream DCU.
