‘The Batman’ Deleted Scene Reveals Barry Keoghan’s Joker, But When Is The Movie on Streaming?

Want to see more of the unnamed, unseen Arkham inmate who pals up to Paul Dano’s Riddler in the final moments of The Batman? Of course you do. And now the not-so-dirty secret is out. It was Barry Keoghan, as The Joker.

This five-minute deleted scene, just released as an Easter egg for fans who clicked on the website that flashes for but a moment at the very end of the end credits, and correctly guessed The Riddler’s online brain teasers, shows a moment from earlier in The Batman‘s plotline in which Robert Pattinson’s hero of vengeance shows up at Arkham State Hospital with the case file for Gotham’s then-unknown serial killer.

We can infer that since The Batman is a Year Two story of Bruce Wayne’s superhero detective saga, that he nabbed Joker at the end of Year One. Why? Because “first anniversary is paper,” Joker wryly notes upon receiving the case files from Batman. “What makes you think I come so cheap?”

“I thought you’d be curious,” Batman replies.

Through the pane glass window, we get a blurry look at this Joker, with disfigured face, head and hands, tufts of greenish hair barely hanging onto the top of his head, and somehow he’s still getting at least a bit of white pancake makeup into his institutional cell.

Joker claims, “I know who he is,” but pressed for an actual ID, he only clarifies that Riddler is “a nobody, wants to be somebody.” At this point in the story, Riddler has killed two major Gotham figures, but hadn’t been stopped or identified by Batman yet.

Batman concludes: “You’re wasting my time.”

And undoubtedly, director Matt Reeves agreed, explaining in interviews this month that he cut the scene.

“It wasn’t necessary,” Reeves told Variety. “It was one of those scenes where, given how complex the narrative was, by taking it out, it kept the story moving in a way it needed to.”

He also told Games Radar a little about his choices for how Keoghan’s Joker might look.

“I worked on it with Mike Marino, who did the makeup, he also did [Penguin actor] Collin [Farrell]’s makeup. He’s a genius. We did some stuff that was really based on Conrad Veidt and The Man Who Laughs. I started thinking, if we’re going to do another iteration of the Joker, I don’t want to do what [Christopher] Nolan had done with the scars. And then, of course, there’s Jack Nicholson and the idea of the chemicals. There are lots of classic versions.

“To me, what was interesting was doing the Elephant Man. The Conrad Veidt idea was that he had some kind of congenital disease, and he couldn’t ever stop smiling. Well, what if Joker has some kind of disease from birth where he’s marked by this horrific smile, and the world treated him in a certain way that created him. We had this nihilistic point of view that came with the fact that fate had played a joke on him since birth. Whereas the Elephant Man had this beautiful soul inside, Joker was turned into this gothic horror figure.

“All of that was going to be done out of focus. So when you see the scene, you’ll see that we sketched in, what Mike sketched in the Joker, but in a way where he had to do that out of focus. And then this final scene was meant to be a callback. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be interesting to finish the Riddler arc and have, right next to him, the Joker, and have the beginning of this relationship?'”

When Will The Batman Stream on HBO Max?

The Batman will premiere on HBO Max on Monday, April 18, and air on HBO on Saturday, April 23 at 8/7c.

Until then, you can catch The Batman in theaters, also without this deleted scene. But you can watch the scene above. No joke!

This story has been updated to reflect the new The Batman release date on HBO Max.

Where to watch The Batman