Striking like a bad case of salmonella—moving swiftly and decisively through the gastrointestinal tract of crime—Robert Pattinson’s The Batman is set to arrive in theaters next summer. But when the R-Pats-Man-Bat does finally swing through Gotham, it won’t be your daddy’s Batman doing it, all safe and clean and properly rated for human consumption by the FDA. No, we have it on good authority that this Batman will be “raw,” “not sanitized,” and will probably—and we’re just going off of everything else available to us here—stink like total shit.
This all comes from Pattinson’s co-star Peter Sarsgaard, who got, let’s say, evocative in his description of the film’s vibe during a SiriusXM radio interview this week. “It’s so raw in that way,” Sarsgaard said, comparing the Matt Reeves-directed film directly to the music of the Pixies, and indirectly to a warm patty of blood-soaked ground beef gently rotting on a countertop. “That’s what I feel like about this. It is not sanitized. It’s got a raw power to it, a raw emotionality,” he added, in case this whole “raw” thing wasn’t coming across. “It’s completely uncooked,” Sarsgaard went on to say, albeit only in our imaginations. “Fire has never touched it. Bacteria teem within it, a civilization in miniature. We’re like gods to them, and yet, if we treat them with insufficient respect, they could kill us where we stood.”
“It’s like sushi, okay?” he then also didn’t go on to add.
Sarsgaard plays District Attorney Gil Colso in the 2021 film, which also co-stars Zoe Kravitz, Paul Dano, John Turturro, and Jeffrey Wright. The film is expected to be a complete departure from Warner Bros.’ rapidly fading Batfleck era, instead introducing Pattinson as a much younger Bruce Wayne still in something approaching his “Year One” era—before a lifetime of battling the criminal element from the shadows of one of America’s most crime-ridden cities managed to put a char-broiled skin of experience over the warm, tender steak tartare within.