After Joker rose to $1 billion at the box office, becoming Warner Bros.’ highest-grossing movie of the year, there’s naturally been a lot of talk of a sequel materializing and even despite Deadline pouring cold water over The Hollywood Reporter’s article announcing that a follow-up is in the works, we’ve been told that it’s definitely going to happen. Not only that, but we’ve also heard that it may hop forward a few years, which could mean that a Jokerverse Batman is on the way.

We’ve previously reported that one star being eyed at this early stage for the part is Bradley Cooper, Phillips’ old colleague from The Hangover films. Our sources have now given us another name though that the studio is apparently interested in: Ryan Gosling. To be clear, there are several other actors under consideration as well and we haven’t been able to confirm if the adult Bruce Wayne would show up in Joker 2 or 3, but it’s believed that the Dark Knight will be introduced “eventually.”

You might be wondering how casting actors like Cooper or Gosling would work though, seeing as they’re around the same age as Joaquin Phoenix and Bruce was depicted as a 10-year-old child in Joker. Well, our sources – the same ones who told us The CW was developing an Arrow spinoff back in March and who revealed a Joker sequel was happening a month before THR confirmed it – have said that the studio is aware of this but aren’t too concerned. In fact, they could simply ignore it, similar to how Jason Statham and Vanessa Kirby’s characters are supposed to be about the same age in Hobbs & Shaw when there’s really 20 years between them.

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In any case, Dante Pereira-Olson played the iconic role in the recent blockbuster, with it left ambiguous as to whether Bruce and Arthur Fleck are actually half-siblings due to a possible affair Thomas Wayne had with Arthur’s mother. The film ended with the Waynes being gunned down, too, as is always their fate, by one of the rioting mask-wearing Gotham citizens inspired by Fleck’s actions.

As such, it really does seem like an inevitability that Batman will show up in either Joker 2 or possibly a third movie – as WB apparently wants to make a trilogy. And whether they go with Gosling, Cooper or someone else entirely, we have no reason to doubt this intel, as it comes to us from the same sources who also told us a Green Lantern show was in development for HBO Max and that Viola Davis would return for The Suicide Squad.