Warner Bros has shared a deleted scene from The Batman featuring Barry Keoghan as The Joker.
The film’s director, Matt Reeves, posted a screenshot of the video to social media on Thursday 24 March.
The image shows The Joker in prison, separated from Robert Pattinson’s Batman by a glass panel.
Using the caption “Who gets the last laugh…?”, Reeves’s tweet also includes a link to game site rataalada.com, where fans are instructed to answer a series of riddles before being able to watch the scene.
In the previously unseen clip, Batman is shown meeting The Joker in Arkham Asylum, where he presents him with a stack of papers.
The Joker teases the superhero that the gesture marks their “first anniversary”. Then, Batman asks for The Joker’s help in understanding a serial killer.
Elsewhere in the scene, the audience also gets a clearer view of Keoghan’s physical transformation for the role. Makeup and special effects create the appearance of deep scarring on the skull, hands, and face.
In a previous interview with Collider, Reeves spoke about why he took the scene out of the final version of the film.
“Not because anyone asked me to cut it, but [I didn’t think] it was necessary,” he explained. “But it’s a really cool scene with that same unseen prisoner in Arkham.”
He added: “There was an earlier scene where Batman, because he’s getting these cards and letters from the Riddler, and he’s thinking, ‘Why is this guy writing to me? I’m supposed to be anonymous and he’s putting a lens on me. I don’t like that,’ and so he goes to kind of profile this kind of serial killer.”
You can read The Independent’s review of The Batman here.
