Over time, Dano has loosened up a little. The Batman, he says, was a major professional and personal pivot – he’d largely avoided work on that scale till then. “But I was able to really enjoy it. It wasn’t too much for me. I liked the fan fervour around it. I became a total Batman dork.” He even wrote a Riddler comic book, published to strong reviews in October 2022, that traced his interpretation of the character’s origins.If the talk of quantity's meant to imply he's dismayed at diversity quota mandates, which The Batman was not immune to, good for him. But it's still head-shaking how a movie emphasizing the dark ends up being considered the movie worth paying for at the theater, certainly if anything more optimistic wasn't, diversity quotas aside. And if any filmmakers are forced to comply with the idea of a quota that's not built on merit, doesn't that make clear there's no creative freedom in Hollywood anymore?
Today, on the heels of The Marvels, Madame Web and The Flash, The Batman feels a bit like one of the superhero genre’s last stands – that final gasp of money-making, crowd-pleasing, cape-and-cowl goodness before franchise fatigue set in. Does he have theories as to why The Batman made it out alive? “There are enough comic book movies where you just know what you’re gonna get. Reading the script for The Batman, you knew it was a real film. Every sentence… that’s just [writer/director] Matt Reeves.”
He thinks our current superhero malaise is the product of an erratic film industry. “It’s an interesting moment where everybody has to go like, ‘OK – what now?’ Hopefully from that, somebody either breathes new life into [comic book movies], or something else blossoms which is not superheroes. I’m sure there will still be some good ones yet to come, but I think it’s kind of a welcome moment.”
“It’s a larger thing, too,” he continues. “As soon as the word ‘content’ came into what we do – meaning making movies or TV – it meant quantity over quality, which I think was a big misstep. And I certainly don’t need that as a viewer or as an artist.”
As for the talk of Dano's recent Riddler comic, what a surprise they sugarcoat it, considering the emphasis put on horror themes at the time. Reviewers come in 2 or more ways - either they'll give you an honest perspective, or they won't, and I wouldn't be shocked if quite a few of those who positively reviewed his comic 2 years back were pretty biased about its angle. It's regrettably been a norm for a long time, and done no favors for the medium, let alone entertainment reviewing itself. But, if you want to see something nigh amusing, it would have to be You Don't Read Comics' review of the premiere chapter, which is favorable, yet the writer considers The Batman worthless:
...Writer/actor Paul Dano takes a look around the edges of the madmen and masked men of the city to cast a light into the psyche of the city in The Riddler: Year One #1. The actor who played the villain in the latest dull and lifeless Batman movie emerges to deliver a captivating story to the comics with the aid of artist Stevan Subic.Seriously? This was enough to fall off the couch laughing about. Sure, Pattinson's movie could be much more overrated than some may argue, but whoda thunk somebody would claim a comics prequel would rise above the movie it draws from? In any event, as I've stated before, we're years past the time these Batman comics could've mattered, and even a prequel to a movie isn't encouraging for me. At least Dano was willing to admit something's gone terribly wrong with the "creative" process for making these films.
...Dano is clearly taking a fresh approach to it which could turn out to be a brilliant comic book prequel to an exceptionally bad Hollywood movie.
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