‘The Batman’ Tested a Four-Hour Cut of the Movie
The Batman is a long movie — now confirmed at two hours and 55 minutes including credits. But that’s nothing. Apparently, Warner Bros. originally tested a version of the film that was even longer. Much longer.
In some private screenings, it seems, The Batman ran four hours long. That’s according to The Hollywood Reporter, whose sources claim “early” test screenings clocked in around a whopping 240 minutes. For point of comparison, that’s almost two full hours longer than Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. And that movie crammed in the origins of Batman and the Joker, along with a whole other plot.
We still know relatively little about The Batman’s full plot, so it’s tough to say just why it needs to be three hours long, much less almost four hours long. We do know it stars Robert Pattinson as the new Dark Knight, with Zoe Kravitz as Catwoman, Jeffrey Wright as Jim Gordon, Andy Serkis as Alfred, Colin Farrell as the Penguin, and Paul Dano as the latest incarnation of the Riddler. The movie was directed and co-written by Matt Reeves; here is the most recent trailer:
Four hours sounds like an awful lot of Batman. But hey; people liked Zack Snyder’s Justice League and that clocked in at 242 minutes as well. Of course, that was a streaming-only film built with chapter breaks, so you could essentially watch it like a miniseries. For some DC Comics fans, there’s no such thing as too much Batman. The Batman is scheduled to open in theaters on March 4.