How Telltale's 'Batman' Game Handled 'The Batman's Plot Better Than The Movie

Warning: the following article contains major spoilers for Batman: The Telltale Series, and probably for The Batman as well. I won't say, because that'd spoil the article too.

Matt Reeves' The Batman just crushed critics and box office doomers with the second biggest opening since the start of that thing that made the world go weird. It's a great film if you like Se7en, The Zodiac (the film or the killer), and even if you like Batman. Robert Pattinson embodies the part so well that he didn't even bother to play Bruce Wayne, but there's a way in which his tales pales in comparison to that of a similar but lesser-known Batman property, Batman: The Telltale Series.

The new film spends one-third of its Lord Of The Rings-sized runtime leading both the audience and poor Bat-man Robert Pattinson to believe that his father, the ever-awesome Dr. Thomas Wayne was actually a power-hungry monster who'd spare no efforts in order to maintain the good name of his family. That would've been quite the departure from the story that certainly would have rubbed many fans the wrong way, but it also would have breathed a lot of fresh air into Bat's character. Is Batman going to keep on pummeling the balls of low-level criminals after he finds out it was an actual low-level criminal who saved Gotham City from daddy Wayne, an even bigger criminal? Well, no need to worry about all those promising possibilities, though, because the movie then pulls a º180 turn by revealing that Thomas was actually a good man all along.

It makes perfect sense that some people would dislike such structural changes to an established character, but I'd expect even people to get mad at the idea of getting batfished for an entire hour. If you've seen the film and are wondering how it could've gone if they'd had the guts to make Bruce's father a villain the way it sure seems like they wanted to, you just have to play Telltale's game. In it, we find out that Thomas Wayne was a full-on monster with a penchant for committing everyone he didn't like to Arkham Asylum. After you recover from the shock of finding out that a billionaire could actually be the worse villain a big city would ever have to deal with, you'll notice that, huh, the game actually rocks hard.

Another interesting aspect of the game is its main villain, a new character by the name of Lady Arkham who, just like the film's The Riddler, is also born out of a thirst for revenge against daddy Wayne's misdeeds. It's interesting how The Batman's version of The Riddler ...

… bares a much closer resemblance to her than he does to the original version of the character.

Join us next time when we go on about how they also should have gone with a different version of The Penguin …

Top Image: Warner Bros.