Excited for The Batman? So are we—and so is Google. Google Search just added a new Easter egg to celebrate the release of the upcoming Bat-film, hitting cinemas next week.
Want to get the Bat-Signal to appear on your screen? Here’s how.
1. In Google Search, either on desktop or mobile, google “Bruce Wayne” “Gotham City” “Caped Crusader” or “Bat Signal” (hyphenated or not).
2. Look on the right for a swivelling yellow Bat-Signal icon.
3. Click or tap the Bat-Signal.
4. Enjoy the show!
Clicking the gif transforms your screen into a stormy night sky that has The Batman’s Bat-Signal shooting across. But don’t click out! Batman himself then makes an appearance, swinging across a grappling hook from one side of the screen to another.
This is not a sponsored Easter egg either, according to Variety, meaning it will run for a full year. Get ready to do this every time you need a quick pick me up.
Want to learn more about The Batman? You’ve come to the right place. We spoke to the whole cast and got a lot of exclusive scoops about the film. Read the beginning below, and read the full story here.
The Batman: Director Matt Reeves reveals how he got his dream film made
Matt Reeves had been dodging calls from Warner Bros. for weeks. He was smack in the middle of five to six months of intense post for War of the Planet of the Apes, the most ambitious film of his career to that point, and nothing was going to break his concentration.
He was huddled with a team of animators at Weta Digital, zoomed in 400% onto the face of the ape Cesar, his lead, agonizing over how to capture the nuance of emotion the scene required, when he got the umpteenth call from his agent. He hesitated, then he answered.
“So that meeting Warner Bros. wants to have. It’s not a general meeting,” his agent opened with. “It’s about Batman.”
Reeves excused himself from the animation desk.
Batman.
Matt Reeves was born in 1966, three months after Adam West’s campy Batman series debuted on television, and by five years old he was watching the reruns after school every day—same bat-time, same bat-channel—entranced by the character.
“The costume, the Batmobile, it was all very captivating. I didn’t see anything funny about it. I just thought ‘wow, Batman is really cool.’” Reeves tells us.
When he got into the comic books in his teens, he started to notice there was something more going on, a character with complexity that none of the others from the costumed set could approach.
“I’ve always felt that the Batman story was a very special story. He’s not really a superhero. He’s someone who’s driven by the pain of his past. He’s trying to find some way to make sense of his life. It’s a very psychological story. This is the character I relate to most,” says Reeves.
There was a version of that story he always dreamed of telling, a deeply personal one, and through Tim Burton’s two goth masterpieces with Michael Keaton, Joel Schumacher’s neon and cartoonish two with Val Kilmer and George Clooney and even Christopher Nolan’s grounded, human-focused Dark Knight Trilogy with Christian Bale, Reeves’s understanding of the Batman remained unexplored.
Unfortunately for him, the Batman script that Warner Bros. was pulse-calling him about wasn’t the take he envisioned. The script they sent over Ben Affleck had written for himself to star in, a film he originally intended to direct before deciding to step back.
“I read a script that they had that was a totally valid take on the movie. It was very action driven. It was very deeply connected to the DCEU, with other major characters from other movies and other comics popping up. I just knew that when I read it this particular script was not the way I’d want to do it,” Reeves explains.
Even as the countdown clock was on for him to turn in Apes, he decided to go to Warner Bros. in person to respectfully tell them no.
“I said look, I think maybe I’m not the person for this. And I explained to them why I love this character. I told them that there have been so many great movies, but if I were to do this, I’d have to make it personal, so that I understood what I was going to do with it, so that I know where to put the camera, so that I know what to tell the actors, so that I know what the story should be. This take, I told them, pointing at the script, is a totally valid and exciting take. It is almost James Bond-ian, but it wasn’t something that I quite related to,” Reeves says.
“So what I’d love to do, if you’re interested, is I’d like to get involved and find a way to take the story and make it very, very personal and get to the place I want him to be, to make it a Batman story and give him the arc, and have the story rock him to his core. It wasn’t going to be another origin story, not with Ben already in the character. But that’s what I would do,” Reeves told them.
Before they got too excited, he dropped the kicker, intended to scare them away for good.
“I said, but here’s the other thing. This is why I think you’re not going to want me to direct this movie. I can’t even tell you what that story is, for months, because I have to finish this Apes movie. And to my utter shock and surprise, they said, ‘you know what, we really would like you to do this. And we will wait.’”
Read more here