Matt Reeves Explains Why Joker Deleted Scene Was Cut From The Batman

The Batman director Matt Reeves has revealed why a scene offering viewers a closer look at Barry Keoghan's Joker didn't make it in to the final cut of the film.

Fans of the Robert Pattinson-led superhero film will know that Keoghan's iconic character wasn't introduced until the very end, when viewers were given glimpses of him in his cell at Arkham Asylum.

It was heavily hinted that the prisoner was indeed Batman's nemesis, and though a lot of viewers came away confident in their suspicions it wasn't confirmed until Reeves treated viewers to a closer look at the character with the release of a deleted scene.

Warner Bros.

The scene takes place before Batman tracked down the Riddler, when he turned to the Joker to try and glean information about the man messing with his mind. However, Reeves ultimately decided to leave the exchange on the cutting room floor.

Speaking in a director's commentary released this week by Warner Bros., Reeves made clear the two actors involved did a good job in the scene but felt it didn't contribute much in terms of moving the story along.

Watch the scene below:

He explained: "When we were putting the movie together, this scene, even though I think that Barry and Rob did such a cool scene together, it was one of these things where narratively it wasn’t necessary.

"You got everything that Barry was telling him, that Joker was telling him, over the course of the movie and given the great length of the movie, it helped the story to take the scene out, but I always really loved the work that Barry and Rob did in the scene," he said.

Reeves explained the reason the scene was written in the first place was because the creators wanted Batman to 'get into the mindset' of the Riddler, who is a serial killer. To do this, Batman would go to Arkham to speak to another serial killer who the writers called in the script the 'unseen prisoner'.

Warner Bros.

"For me what I wanted to do in trying to launch a new Gotham was to have it be as if all of these characters that we know in Gotham already exist and here we have a version of this character who is not yet the Joker but is going to become the Joker, and I wanted Batman to have had an experience with him that put him in Arkham."

Though Reeves has now made clear that the Joker, in some capacity, exists in the world of Pattinson's Batman, it's yet to be revealed whether he will act as the lead villain in the sequel.