'The Batman' trailer sees Robert Pattinson's caped crusader searching for answers

The trailer for the latest film featuring Batman, The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson as Gotham's Caped Crusader, has dropped its first full trailer. The film is set to release on March 4, 2022, in the US, and is a reboot of the franchise that is planned to include up to two more films. Here is the first full trailer for The Batman directed by Matt Reeves:

'The Batman' trailer breakdown

The trailer begins with a SWAT team raiding what appears to be a diner and arresting a man who leaves behind a coffee cup with a ‘?’ froth.

Inspector Gordon summons The Batman using the Bat-Signal, and Robert Pattinson’s avatar duly answers. He grapples with face-painted thugs, and meets an incarcerated man who has done something dire. ‘This is a powderkeg and The Riddler’s the match,’ Wayne says, as Zoe Kravitz, ‘Cat woman’ both reassures and warns him in different instances.

Wayne searches for answers, with Alfred (Andy Serkis) making the stakes clear to him. The Batman, resigned, enters Gotham’s underbelly and takes the fight to his mysterious enemies.

Robert Pattinson takes forward Christian Bale-Christopher Nolan legacy

The upcoming film is intended as a reboot, set in the second year of The Batman fighting crime. It is unknown how it ties in, if at all, to the Nolan Batman trilogy, though it does share a lot more thematically with it than it does with the latest Batman incarnation, the one played by Ben Affleck in DC's Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League.

Affleck was earlier set to lead the standalone film himself and also direct, but opted out completely in 2019, with Robert Pattinson, who emerged as the actor who played the ill-fated Cedric Diggory in the Harry Potter films and shot to fame as vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight saga, coming aboard as the next Batman.

This film is likely to feature The Riddler as the primary antagonist, though there is always the likelihood of other villains lurking in the shadows. The trailer shows Pattinson's Batman taking on quite a lot of gunfire head-on, perhaps a slight departure from Bale's Batman. Apart from potentially two more films, two spin-off TV series are also part of the DC-Warner Brothers plan. 

Pattinson the seventh actor to play Batman in a Live-action film

Robert Pattinson is the seventh actor to play the Batman in a live-action theatrical film. After Adam West took his TV Batman to cinemas in 1966's Batman: The Movie, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer and George Clooney played Gotham’s Dark Knight in the late-80s and 90s in with varying degrees of success. However, it was the subsequent three films - Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises - featuring Christian Bale, that really rekindled the franchise and gave the Batman a complete story arc. Ben Affleck then took up the cowl, playing an aging but bulky Batman trying to be the elder statesman in a world irrevocably changed by the arrival of Superman.

Image: 'The Batman' trailer screengrab/Warner Bros. Pictures