9 Possible Reasons The Joker Scene Got Cut Out From The Batman

9. It Is Too Routine?

Matt Reeves knows his crime thriller film history. The Batman is a collection of it: The voyeuristic intro is a homage to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, the overall tone is reminiscent of David Fincher’s nihilistic films, such as Se7en and Zodiac, and the batmobile chase is said to be inspired by car chase scenes like that from The French Connection.

It would not be too out of place, then, for a The Silence of The Lambs homage, referencing the scene where Clarice Starling regularly visits Hannibal Lecter in his prison cell, so he can advise her with a brilliant psychological evaluation of a serial killer. Like that sequence from The Silence of The Lambs, in The Baman deleted scene there is this lingering feeling that the one really in control is the guy trapped in the cell and there is barely any difference between the hero and the villain aside from the glass wall separating them.

As Matt Reeves' stated with his interview in Entertainment Weekly:

Because the movie is a serial killer story and I wanted Batman to be going down all these back alleys, I wanted him to turn to another serial killer in Arkham because he was so unsettled about why [the Riddler] would be writing him [and] he's trying to profile the character.

The problem is almost every filmmaker and their grandmothers have homaged this dynamic to death already. Every time the hero wants something out of a master criminal in a cell, Hannibal Lecter always springs to mind. The deleted scene of The Joker in Arkham is not exactly rocking the boat.

We already have so many of these. Why not just cut another one?