Holy foul language, Batman! A new clip from the movie The Penguin, which is currently being made, shows that Matt Reeves’ version of Gotham is getting more R-rated. Could The Batman 2 do the same?
How Batman Was Made A Twitter account posted a clip of Colin Farrell as Oswald “Oz” Cobblepot casually dropping an F-bomb on the set of The Penguin. Farrell was heavily made up for the scene. The HBO Max series, a spinoff of The Batman from last year, just started filming in New York City. In response to the first clip, the account #TeamDC – Por Siempre posted another behind-the-scenes clip from The Penguin.
The fact that The Penguin has one f-word doesn’t mean it will be TV-MA (the TV equivalent of an R rating), but the way Oz uses it shows that the spinoff has more f***s to give. The success of HBO Max’s other live-action spinoff, Peacemaker, shows that the streaming service isn’t afraid to let its DC content get explicit. The real question is whether or not The Batman Part 2 will do the same.
Matt Reeves’ version of The Dark Knight already went as far as the PG-13 rating could go. The movie’s only F-bomb was used in the first five minutes. After that, there was a constant stream of bloodless violence. It might make sense for Reeves to go all the way and give The Batman Part 2 an R rating.
It wouldn’t be the first time in the DCU, for sure. The 2019 movie Joker was a hard R, but it made $1 billion worldwide. Justice League by Zack Snyder and The Killing Joke, which came out in 2016, were rated R when they first came out on HBO Max.
Warner Bros. has always been bold in connecting the DC brand with mature material. The Suicide Squad was an R-rated splatterfest, more like a Troma movie than a superhero movie. Even though it was a cartoon, Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay was just as bloody as the real-life version.
Colin Farrell cursing as Oz Cobblepot, during the filming of a scene for ‘The Penguin’ in New York City:
"None of those fucks had the balls to do what I did…"pic.twitter.com/4V9d7InYyg
— The Art of The Batman (@thebatfilm) March 9, 2023
Now that James Gunn has said he will make a movie called Brave and the Bold with a more family-friendly Caped Crusader, it makes sense for The Batman Part 2 to be rated R. Gunn has said that the new mainline DCU will be more like its rival, the MCU, which means it will probably be mostly PG-13. Under the Elseworlds banner, Joker 2 and the second Matt Reeves Batman movie will occur outside the DCU.
IMDb says that The Penguin will come out sometime in 2023, two years before The Batman Part 2. How fans react to the series could affect where Matt Reeves goes with his Batman sequel. If people don’t like how often Cobblepot swears, Warner Bros. could tell Reeves to tone down the violence and swearing in The Batman Part 2 instead of making it worse.
The success of The Batman Part 2 will depend on how good the movie is, not on whether it is rated R, PG-13, or even PG. You can only save a good script and good direction with all the curses in the world. Matt Reeves has already shown that he has what it takes to make a hit Batman movie, regardless of the rating.
