There’s a lot of mystery surrounding Matt Reeve’s The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson as the Caped Crusader. However, during the latest episode of Fatman Beyond Podcast, Kevin Smith told co-host Marc Bernardin that that the film’s plot would pull from the classic comic arc The Long Halloween:
“To be fair, I heard it too, and I heard it from a good source too.”
Smith has connections in the entertainment industry and DC Entertainment (he’s directed his fair share of Arrowverse series, and once wrote a version of Tim Burton’s Superman Lives), so his “from a good source” quote holds some weight to it.
The Long Halloween was written by Jeph Loeb with artwork by Tim Sale, and spans the course of a year. It features several classic Batman villains, and is set during his early years as a crime fighter. Basically, it is ripe for adaptation.
Plot Synopsis:
Christmas. St. Patrick’s Day. Easter. As the calendar’s days stack up, so do the bodies littered in the streets of Gotham City. A murderer is loose, killing only on holidays. The only man that can stop this fiend? The Dark Knight. In a mystery taking place during Batman’s early days of crime fighting, Batman: The Long Halloween is one of the greatest Dark Knight stories ever told.
Working with District Attorney Harvey Dent and Lieutenant James Gordon, Batman races against the calendar as he tries to discover who Holiday is before he claims his next victim each month. A mystery that has the reader continually guessing the identity of the killer, this story also ties into the events that transform Harvey Dent into Batman’s deadly enemy, Two-Face.“
I’ve only heard good things about The Long Halloween, and it has been a rumored contender for a DC Universe Animated Original Movie for a long time. I’d be totally down for a live-action Batman film that features a wide array of classic villains. Especially since we were so close to a version of that with Affleck’s Batman.
Would you be down for The Batman to be based on The Long Halloween? Who would you cast as Batman’s rogues?
