AMC is charging more to see The Batman than other movies

The Batman is the newest movie in the long, ever renewed story of Bruce Wayne, billionaire playboy by day and bat-suited crimefighter by night. The new one, which comes out in theaters this weekend, has director Matt Reeves behind the camera and Robert Pattinson under the cowl. The reviews are good an anticipation is high…and theaters owners know it.

According to Deadline, AMC is even experimenting with charging more (about $1 more, to be specific) for tickets to see The Batman compared to other movies. “Currently, our prices for The Batman are slightly higher than the prices we are charging for other movies playing in the same theaters at the same time,” AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron said during an earnings call. “This is all quite novel in the United States, but actually AMC has been doing it for years in our European theaters. Indeed, in Europe we charge a premium for the best seats in the house — as do just about all sellers of tickets in other industries — take sports events, concerts and live theater, for example.”

It’s true that this kind of variant pricing strategy has been going on for a while in Europe; AMC also charges more for weekend tickets than for weekday ones. But that doesn’t make it any less annoying. I might just look at a different theater when I see the movie…

How Robert Pattinson came up with (and then abandoned) his Bat-voice

As for the movie itself, the cast have been out in force promoting it. For instance, Pattinson recently appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and talked about how he came up with the voice he would use as Batman; every actor does it a bit differently.

“I wanted to do a radically different thing to all the other Batmen,” Pattinson said, “and had started in a kind of… I just thought, because everyone does this kind of gruff, gravelly thing, I’m like ‘I’m gonna do the opposite, I’m gonna go really whispery.’ And I tried to do it for the first like two weeks, and it just looked absolutely atrocious, and they told me to stop doing it.”

Apparently, Christian Bale did something very similar on Christopher Nolan’s Bat trilogy. That also got abandoned. “And if you listen to the first Batman Begins teaser trailer, you can hear the original voice. I only found this out a couple of weeks ago. It’s kind of interesting.”

Ultimately, Pattinson’s Batman voice will probably be pretty similar to what we’ve heard other actors do. Expect something rough and gravely. “You can feel when it feels right,” Pattinson said. “There’s something… You put the suit on, and you have to speak in a certain way.”

Colin Farrell explains why the Penguin no longer smokes

Moving on to one of the villains of piece, Colin Farrell — who plays the Penguin — stopped by Jake’s Takes to explain why his iconic mob boss character no longer smokes, as the Penguin has done in movies and comics for literally decades.

“Big studios make big decisions around such things as the presence of cigarettes in films,” Farrell said. “I fought valiantly for a cigar. At one stage I said, ‘I can have it unlit! Just let me have it unlit.’ They were like, ‘No.’ Like a bunch of 12-year-olds are going to start smoking Cuban cigars.”

Clearly Farrell clearly doesn’t think much of Warner Bros.’ attempts to keep the movie family-friendly. It does seem a little weird. Like, I’m in agreement that smoking is bad, but so is organized crime and the film has no problem depicting that. The Riddler is now a terrifying terrorist inspired by the Zodiac Killer, Batman is a maladjusted basket case who works out his issues by beating the crap out of people, Catwoman is a thief…if the movie wants to deal with these kinds of mature themes I don’t see why smoking is off the table.

Superman won’t be in The Batman (or in the sequel, probably)

Finally, Reeves talked to Collider about where the sequel to The Batman might go, because you know Warner Bros. is going to want sequels; it already has two TV shows in the works, one about the Penguin and another about the Gotham City police department, so a Batman Cinematic Universe is already in the making.

Specifically, Collider wanted to know if other DC heroes like Superman could ever show up, but Reeves isn’t focused on that right now. “I suppose it’s not impossible to believe that somewhere down the line, they could connect to something else, but that was not my interest in this, and it’s not my interest in what we would do in follow-ups at the moment either,” the director said. “There are a lot of great characters in the Gotham world and so the idea of leaning into that, that’s really my interest right now.”

"In this movie, even further I think than what I did in [Planet of the Apes and Cloverfield], I tried to find the practical, believable version. If suddenly in the Batman world, you discovered that there was an alien that was Superman, there’d be a lot of shock. I mean, people would have to say, oh my God, and maybe that would be the one fantastical element…[T]hat is not the intention at this point, to figure out how to make that come. Look, we should be so lucky that this is a world that people embrace and that they say, oh my God, we want to see what would happen when those things collide. I think if that challenge ever presents itself, it would be an exciting one to explore, but I’d have to try and do it through this lens. You know what I mean? And that is absolutely right, that at the moment, to me, this world is the place that I want to focus."

In other words, give it a couple years.

The Batman comes out on March 4.

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