The Batman Deleted Scene Reveals The Joker

Well, there you have it folks: Our first good look at Barry Keoghan's Clown Prince of Crime — the Joker himself! After yet another insufferable series of riddles through the AR website rataalada.com, Warner Bros. has released the full deleted scene from Matt Reeves' "The Batman" featuring Robert Pattinson's Caped Crusader talking to Joker at Arkham Asylum. To get there, it's going to take some clever detective work worthy of Batman himself. You see, if you go to the Rata Alada, you'll be asked to play a sadistic game of riddles, with the order being randomized for each user. One of them goes "Once you've been set up, it hits you at the end. Straight on," the other "It's not a joke, but sometimes you need to shout it twice to really mean it," and lastly "To wit: a wild card in the truest sense."

You get endless guesses, with amusing responses when you get it wrong. If you really struggle with one riddle, the website gives you a chance to answer another, but you must answer all three to get the deleted scene. (The answers, if you really want to be spoiled, are, in order: Punchline, Ha, and Joker.) When you answer correctly, you get a link to the deleted scene, which you can watch in its entirety below. This deleted scene has been a long time coming. Rumors spread a while back that Barry Keoghan had been cast in a secret role for "The Batman," which many thought to be Joker. Adding fuel to the fire, Warner Bros. reportedly test screened the film both with and without him in it. Then, when the final film was released and audiences got a very brief and obfuscated look at the new Mr. J, director Matt Reeves confirmed that he did shoot an extended scene featuring Batman and Joker that played sort of like "The Silence of The Lambs." Indeed, the scene is just like any other scene where a detective visits an imprisoned psychopath and uses him to find the new killer. What's intriguing is the palpable sense of history between the two new iterations of the characters, despite their short time together on screen. Then there is the new look of the Joker. Keoghan's take on the character is far from the elegant Joker played by Jack Nicholson, or the man with the facial scars played by Heath Ledger, or even Jared Leto's gangster with face tattoos. Instead, this Joker looks like he just got out of the vat of acid, with a deformed face that Matt Reeves says is inspired by the original source of inspiration for the Joker: The 1928 film "The Man Who Laughs," about a man disfigured as a child to have a perpetual grin. According to Reeves, it is not guaranteed that we will see this Joker in a potential sequel to "The Batman," but you can still delight yourself by the extended scene above.

Joker Sequel Reportedly Still in Development

A sequel to Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix‘s Joker is reportedly still in the works. Although the film’s release date and other details were not revealed, MangaSpurs stated that almost all of DC’s forthcoming films and TV shows “will take place in the same universe.” The report specified The Flash movie with Ezra Miller, the HBO Max spinoff Gotham PD and “Joker and its planned sequel,” also noting that the projects not included is Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson‘s The Batman and the upcoming Superman reboot.

Rumors of a Joker sequel have gone quiet since the release of the film in 2019, and although neither Phillips nor Phoenix officially confirmed their involvement in the possible project, the director stated in early 2020 that he was willing to sign on alongside the actor. “When a movie does $1 billion and cost $60 million to make, of course it comes up,” he laughed. “But Joaquin and I haven’t really decided on it. We’re open. I mean, I’d love to work with him on anything, quite frankly. So who knows? But it would have to have a real thematic resonance the way this one did, ultimately being about childhood trauma and the lack of love, and the loss of empathy. All those things are really what made this movie work for us, so we’d have to have something that had an equal thematic resonance.” In related news, Warner Bros. and DC are reportedly “committed” to hiring a Black director for its Black Superman film.