This past week Matt Reaves released a thoroughly teased and anticipated deleted scene from The Batman involving the Joker. In the scene we see Batman reaching out to Joker in an attempt to get into the mind of Riddler. The Joker is rarely in focus and when we do see him, he’s uncomfortable to look at. He’s scarred. He’s ugly. There’s nothing pretty or handsome about this verison of Batman’s most notorious villian.

Matt Reaves has said he left the scene on the cutting room floor because he felt it really didn’t add anything to the overall story and that’s fair for a movie that is almost 3 hours long. But I suspect that it has more to do with the fact that introducing Joker and not utilizing him would have been a distraction to the rest of the movie. The Joker is such a force in today’s society that if we got this scene it’s all anyone would be talking about after the movie. As it stands now, at the end of the movie we only get a taste of what Barry Keoghan would have done or could do with the role and it’s still one of the most talked about parts of an incredibly epic movie.

So why now? Why release the scene now? Why not save it as a bonus for when it’s released on DVD? I have a theory. The executives likely want The Joker to be the lead villian in the inevitable sequel but weren’t sure if the general public was tired of seeing Joker stories. So they float this out there to see how people respond. Similar to when someone leaked the Deadpool test footage and suddnely a movie was made after the fans demanded it. If that is the case, that the executives just wanted to see the response, I’d say based upon these YouTube views, expect to see The Clown Prince of Crime in The Batman 2.

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