It remains pretty funny to us that James Gunn—who has, over the course of 20 years, gone from “Troma refugee making gross-out alien slug movies” to “Co-head of one of Hollywood’s biggest IPs”—still has time for the little things. Like, say, personally hopping on social media to try to smack down rumors about movies that are being made under his watch, even though he presumably has people to do that now. For instance: Gunn seems genuinely annoyed that folks online are speculating that Matt Reeves’ The Batman Part II will feature an appearance by the Cape Crusaders’ circus-skilled sidekick Robin, rumors that seem to have percolated up onto the internet out of, basically, nowhere.
Per Variety, Gunn hopped on Threads this weekend to remind people that, to the best of his knowledge, only six people on the planet have read the script for the film, which Reeves and co-author Mattson Tomlin finished back in late June, so he’d really appreciate it if the rest of us could knock it off with the very public guesswork. (One of the others gifted with the sacred knowledge is presumably Gunn’s co-head at DC Studios, Peter Safran; he didn’t specify the other two.) Gunn didn’t call him out by name, but Patient Zero for the Robin rumors seems to have been Jeff Sneider’s The Insneider newsletter, a document that those of us who spend our days trying to filter out entertainment news bullshit on the internet typically know to treat like a flaming school bus barreling through an intersection: Something to keep tabs on, certainly, but nothing you want to follow too closely.
It is, honestly, kind of hard to imagine how you’d incorporate Robin into a version of Gotham City as grounded as The Batman‘s in any case. Reeves made it clear in his first film that he likes keeping his heroes close to human—there’s a reason the “final boss” of The Batman is, like, two guys with shotguns and clear sightlines—so having an acrobatic kid flipping around in the middle of fights feels pretty far off from the tone. Although Christopher Nolan flirted with a version of the character for the final movie of his Dark Knight trilogy—revealing that Joseph Gordan Levitt’s heroic cop had “Robin” as his unused first name—the character hasn’t appeared in a live-action movie since 1997’s Batman & Robin. (He’s been far more prominent in TV and animation, having last showed up in theaters in Teen Titans Go! To The Movies. And, uh, puppetry, as DC Studios continues to work on Dynamic Duo, an odd-sounding stop-motion/animated film that will reportedly focus on the Dick Grayson and Jason Todd versions of the character.)
Anyway, Gunn—a studio head, screenwriter, and director of one of the bigger movies of 2025—was also bluntly playing goalie against the forces of superhero speculation: “Guys please stop believing this nonsense,” he wrote. “I think six of us have read the script. No one knows anything about ‘the Batman 2.’”
