Or will it usher in the superhero studio’s demise? With so many past – often flawed – takes on the Dark Knight, no wonder fans are nervous about meeting his next incarnation

A lot is riding on Matt Reeves’ The Batman, which a new report suggests is due to begin shooting in November - with or without Ben Affleck as the tortured Dark Knight.

Warner Bros’ struggling DC extended universe of superhero movies currently lacks a central pivot, despite decent enough solo outings for Wonder Woman and Aquaman. The studio would love to see Reeves somehow come up with a movie that repositions the caped crusader at the heart of the DC world. And yet it is difficult to see how the main creative thrust behind the successful Planet of the Apes remake trilogy can carve out his own vision without taking Batman out of the Justice League, and potentially the DCEU itself, altogether. Bruce Wayne surely needs to be given the chance to breathe the foul Gotham City air once again, free of responsibility for fending off attacks from bad CGI alien interlopers or resurrecting Superman due to his own foolhardy behaviour. Everything we’ve heard about Reeves’ plans suggests he will take a back-to-basics approach, restoring the furrow-browed superhero to his roots as a sleuth-some Gotham City vigilante.

This has to be a good thing. For the last three years, ever since Zack Snyder’s ill-fated Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice failed to wow anyone outside a hardcore of DC fans, Warner has been trying and failing to convince the world that Batfleck was a good idea poorly managed. It did this by tweaking the movie’s sequels and spin-offs to rid them of the worst knuckleheaded excesses of Snyder’s films. But the truth is that casting Affleck was a terrible idea carried out terribly, and no amount of shoehorned “comedy” one-liners was going to save films such as Justice League from being roundly dismissed.

The temptation must surely be for Reeves to make with the Lazarus Pit, and resurrect a new and more workable Batman – preferably played by anyone but Affleck. Perhaps DC needs two cinematic universes: one based on the grimy Gotham underworld and its cavalcade of leering freaks and deviants; the other filled with sci-fi-tinged superheroes who wouldn’t look out of place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, such as Aquaman, Wonder Woman and the Flash.

For the Batman of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, or the TV series Gotham, has often seemed about as likely to meet Superman or the other members of the Justice League as Luke Skywalker is to encounter Genghis Khan. It is quite possible to imagine the worst big-screen caped crusaders, George Clooney or Val Kilmer, meeting just about anyone in the DC ’verse – even the buffoonish Shazam! That’s because there is nothing stylistically singular about them at all, unless one is counting the Batnipples.

Where other superheroes seem to grow as part of the ensemble, Batman – certainly based on our experience with the last few DC movies – only seems to diminish. Perhaps Gotham’s dark knight is simply too weird, too idiosyncratic a superhero to ever play nicely with others. The only question is why DC wasn’t well aware of this, given that its own Lego Batman Movie mined Bruce Wayne’s extreme narcissism and inelegant misanthropy for comedy gold so successfully.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Narcissist … The Lego Batman Movie, 2017. Photograph: Courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures

Might The Batman see the emergence of a dark knight whose presence in the wider DC world is left pretty much open to question? And would this be such a bad thing? It’s possible Warner simply doesn’t have the confidence in its own plans, particularly after the lukewarm reactions to Justice League, to manage the movie in any other way. Its entire approach to the DCEU seems to have been a case of one step forward, six tentative steps back, so we’re about as likely to see a considered, Marvel-style route to world-building at this late stage as we are to see the Joker giving up his life of crime and embarking on a new career as a supermarket shelf stacker.

Perhaps this is for the best. If Warner Bros is not naturally tuned to the the slow-burn, producer-led cinematic universe frequency, the studio would be well-advised to avoid hamfistedly trying to keep on fitting square pegs into round holes. In that case, the only solution is to take the whole thing one movie at a time. Maybe, just maybe, we need to take a long hard look at Reeves’ solo Batman outing before anyone can really imagine what shape the wider DC universe should be.