To prevent spoilers, the director of "The Batman" specially shot fake clips to divert attention

"The Batman" director Matt Reeves revealed that in order to prevent spoilers, he deliberately shot some fake clips to divert the attention of spoilers.

In August 2020, a YouTube video revealed that Barry Keoghan would play Gotham police officer Stanley Merkel in The Batman. Later, a still was leaked, in which Keoghan was wearing a police uniform, confirming the previous rumors. However, in the feature film of The Batman, the audience discovered that Keoghan was the actor of the new version of the Joker.

Warner Bros. seemed to have done its best to make everyone think that Barry Keoghan would play Stanley Merkel, and we can still see this on Baidu Encyclopedia. Matt Reeves admitted it simply: "That's the effect we wanted."

Reeves said: "When making a movie like this, I always want to do something different and give the audience a special experience. For me, the special experience is to walk into the theater and see a surprise. What I am most worried about is that everyone will guess during the filming process. So we thought, should we mislead everyone first? So we got Stanley Merkel out, because there are a lot of policemen in the movie, the credibility is very high, and then we succeeded."

However, the smokescreen effect did not last long, and soon there were rumors that Keohane was actually playing the Joker. Keohane's family even took to social media to expose the news, which is really hard to describe.