While The Batman will present perhaps the darkest take on the Dark Knight ever told on the big screen so far, there wasn’t anything filmed for the feature that would have pushed its rating too far. Officially, The Batman has been rated PG-13 for “strong violent and disturbing content, drug content, strong language, and some suggestive material.” When this was first announced, it dismayed some fans who thought this might be the first theatrical Batman film to get an R rating.

The rating was no surprise to director Matt Reeves. From the start, Reeves had developed The Batman to be rated PG-13, never keeping the door open for an R rating. In a recent interview with Den of Geek, the director explained that keeping anything that would have been deemed R-rated out of the film from the very beginning, as he wanted as big of an audience to see this film as possible.

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With the PG-13 in mind from the start, Reeves never bothered filming scenes he knew he’d have to cut. This means there won’t be a more extreme R-rated version waiting to be released on Blu-ray. Maintaining the PG-13 rating didn’t require any major edits, and even with a lot of footage getting scrapped, there’s nothing that would have changed the rating.

“In my mind, the movie was always going to be a gritty, edgy, noir, thrilling spectacle that was PG-13. That was always what it was, but I always knew that we’d be pushing the limits of what that could be, and so we didn’t really have to cut anything…I’m happy we got the rating because I want people to be able to come to see the movie.”

“There isn’t some special cut of this movie where it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, here’s the R rating that you’ve been desperately wanting.’ I didn’t have to suddenly start drastically cutting the movie or anything like that.”

The Batman Isn’t R-Rated, But It Sure Is Long

     Warner Bros.

The Batman is not going to be a short film. It consists of enough PG-13-rated footage to give it a final runtime of 2 hours and 47 minutes, taking up almost three hours of viewers’ time. This makes The Batman one of the longest superhero features ever made, surpassed only by Avengers: Endgame at 181 minutes and Zack Snyder’s Justice League at 242 minutes. An extended or alternate cut of The Batman is still possible, just none that will be R-rated.

Matt Reeves directs The Batman using a screenplay co-written with Peter Craig. Robert Pattinson stars in the lead role alongside Zoe Kravitz, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, John Turturro, Peter Sarsgaard, Andy Serkis, and Colin Farrell. The film is set about two years into Batman’s new life as Gotham City’s savior, skipping past the traditional origin story but still following a young Bruce Wayne as a crime-fighter still finding his way in a city filled with violent psychopaths.

The Batman is scheduled to be released in movie theaters on March 4, 2022.