When Robert Pattinson was announced to be taking over the role of Bruce Wayne in Matt Reeves’ reboot The Batman, a lot of DC fans were up in arms. They couldn’t accept that the teen heartthrob from the Twilight movies was going to don the Bat’s cowl and exact vigilante justice on the streets of Gotham. There was even a Change.org petition set up to get him replaced. As soon as the first trailer dropped online, however, many of those fans ate their words. The final “I’m vengeance!” beatdown, in particular, signified that the role of Batman is in very safe hands. But some fans are still skeptical that Pattinson can pull it off.
Fan backlash to casting is nothing new for the Batman franchise. Pattinson’s predecessor Ben Affleck faced widespread outrage when it was announced that he would play Bruce Wayne in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. When Tim Burton cast Michael Keaton, who was then primarily known as a comedic actor, to play the lead role in 1989’s Batman, the offices of Warner Bros. were flooded with a whopping 50,000 complaint letters. The outrage isn’t always confined to the actors playing Batman. Surprisingly, a lot of fans were upset when Heath Ledger was announced to play the Joker in The Dark Knight.
Just like Keaton and Affleck, whose portrayals of Batman were widely acclaimed by both critics and the fans who initially shunned them, Ledger proved the naysayers wrong within a single scene. Inspired by Malcolm McDowell’s Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange, Ledger turned Christopher Nolan’s realistic take on the Clown Prince of Crime into one of the greatest villains in movie history. He received a posthumous Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and did a much better job of capturing the Joker’s unique brand of insanity than his successors Jared Leto and Joaquin Phoenix.
Nolan had initially auditioned Ledger for the role of Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, and while he didn’t think he was right for that part, he did find Ledger to be an impeccable actor and kept him in mind. When Nolan began work on The Dark Knight, Ledger was his only choice for the role of the Joker. Reeves was similarly certain about Pattinson. He didn’t take the responsibility of choosing a new Batman for the big screen lightly. After narrowing down the shortlist to Pattinson and Nicholas Hoult, Reeves spent a long time discussing the role with the two actors and watching over their past work before determining Pattinson to be the perfect choice.
The reason why a lot of fans initially objected to Ledger’s casting, despite Nolan insisting that he was right for the part, was that his best-known work at that point was the teen romcom 10 Things I Hate About You. Granted, his charming turn as bad boy Patrick in that movie doesn’t exactly suggest he’d be convincing as a chaos-loving terrorist clown, but that’s what acting is for. Pattinson’s backlash can similarly be attributed to previous teen-oriented work, like Remember Me and the Twilight series. The actor has made no secret of the fact that he doesn’t even like Twilight. The franchise simply gave him the clout to pursue smaller-scale projects that he was more passionate about, like The Rover.
Much like Ledger, when Pattinson was tapped to join the Batman franchise, he already had an impressive body of work outside of his teen movies that proved he’d be more than capable of tackling a formidable DC role. Ledger had given powerful, nuanced performances in acclaimed dramas like Brokeback Mountain and Monster’s Ball prior to being cast in The Dark Knight. Pattinson, on the other hand, has taken a deep dive into auteur cinema in the years since he was freed from the shackles of The Twilight Saga, bringing plenty of pathos to such cerebral films as Good Time, High Life, and The Lighthouse. His jaded billionaire character in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is basically Bruce Wayne.
Ironically, the Batman actors that faced the least backlash, like Val Kilmer and George Clooney, are the ones whose movies end up leaving fans bitterly disappointed. Physically, Kilmer and Clooney were better-suited to the role of Bruce Wayne than Keaton, but their actual performances paled in comparison to his. Usually, outside-the-box casting choices are the ones that end up working much better in the long run.
If there’s a lesson to be learned from the ultimately unfounded protests against the casting of Ledger, Keaton, and Affleck, it’s that fans should at least give actors a chance before declaring them to be the wrong choice for a role – and the ones that fans don’t think they’ll like usually turn out to be the ones they like the most. Whether or not Pattinson makes a great Caped Crusader won’t be clear until The Batman actually hits theaters, but the trailer and the last few years of the actor’s filmography are very promising signs.
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