Matt Reeves Says ‘Batman’ Won’t Be a ‘Year One’-Style Origin Story

“We are working on getting our draft [in] the next couple weeks,” Reeves said

Matt Reeves Batman Year One
Getty Images; Warner Bros.

“The Batman” director Matt Reeves says the film won’t be an origin story in the vein of Frank Miller’s beloved “Year One” series, but will rather be a “defining” and “very personal” story about the Dark Knight.

“Year One is one of the many comic books that I love. We are definitely not doing Year One,” Reeves said at a Television Critics Association panel, according to Slash Film. “It’s just exciting to be focused very specifically on a tale that is defining for him and very personal to him.”

Reeves, who was at TCA to promote his new Fox drama “The Passage,” added:  “Obviously, we’re not doing an origin tale or anything like that. We’re doing a story that is definitively Batman though, and trying to tell a story that’s emotional and yet is really about him being the world’s greatest detective and all the things that for me, since I was a kid, made me love Batman.”

Reeves also said he is hard at work on a draft.

“We are working on getting our draft [in] the next couple weeks,” Reeves said. “Right now, my head is totally into the script. Right now, I’m going to be leaving here to go back to work on the script.”

He said he hopes production could begin “hopefully in the spring or early summer, something like that,” according to Slash Film.

Reeves also said that his Batman will connect to the DC Universe, unlike Christopher Nolan’s standalone Dark Knight trilogy.

“There are ways in which all of this connects to DC, to the DC universe as well,” Reeves said. “We’re one piece of many pieces so I don’t want to comment on that except to say that I’m focused very specifically on this aspect of the DC world.”

And — shocker — it will be noir-inspired.

“I’ve talked about making it a very point of view noir-driven definitive Batman story in which he is investigating a particular case and that takes us out into the world of Gotham,” Reeves said.

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