Things looked bleak, even for the Dark Knight. After multiple delays already pushing back the release of The Batman: Part II to February 18, 2028, the Caped Crusader suffered another blow with the announcement that production had paused as director Matt Reeves stepped away for personal reasons. But here’s the thing about the Batman: yes, he may be a brooding creature of the night, and, yes, he may keep on file contingency plans for defeating his closest friends. But Batman is never truly alone.So, who should come the rescue, but Steven Soderbergh, playing the Superman to Reeves’ beleaguered Batman. Deadline has announced that Soderbergh will “help finish principal photography for the final weeks” of the shoot. The precise wording there is notable, as is the clarification that DC Studios co-head James Gunn posted to social media, noting, “Matt is still the director of The Batman 2 and always will be.” Yet, even with those qualifications, it’s impossible to think that Soderbergh won’t have some influence on the finished product, and that could make for a very different, and very exciting type of Batman movie.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});The average moviegoer knows Steven Soderbergh primarily for the big blockbuster films he made in the ’90s and early 2000s, primarily Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s Eleven, and Traffic, the last of which won him a Best Director Academy Award. However, most of Soderbergh’s (very full) filmography consists of experimental movies that play with the cinematic form. He broke out with 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, a psychosexual drama about a weirdo (James Spader, of course) who films women confessing their fantasies. In 2002, right after Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven, he made the low-budget talkie Full Frontal to play with digital video techniques and Solaris, an attempt to marry the contemplative sci-fi of the Andrei Tarkovsky original to glossy Hollywood filmmaking. In recent years, Soderbergh has been experimenting with the iPhone as a viable film camera and with streaming services as distribution models, which has allowed him to release eleven movies in nine years.Soderbergh’s adventurous spirit helps explain why he, a respected Academy Award winner, would be willing to work under someone else’s vision. And, to be sure, that’s the way he talks about his involvement in the movie. “The goal here is to work with Matt and his team to generate footage that will integrate seamlessly with what’s already been shot so Matt can properly finish his film,” he said in a statement released to Deadline.Yet, that playfulness will certainly change some of The Batman: Part II‘s look, if not its structure. The Batman took a film noir approach to the DC Comics hero, making Robert Pattinson‘s Bruce Wayne an emo version of a hard-boiled detective. It featured a grounded, realistic Batman who made mistakes, but told it through heightened, red-hued visuals.Those all fit within Soderbergh’s style (remember the heavy yellow and blue tints of Traffic?). But the adventurousness of Soderbergh’s more recent work means that we might see him try using unexpected cameras and unique angles in the movie, adding a new flavor to the mix.And that’s all for the better. Because even though the Batman likes to do things his own way, he’s learned time and again that his fight for justice is more effective, and more exciting, when he accepts the help of others.The Batman: Part II will arrive in theaters on February 18, 2028.The post The Batman: Part II Just Became a Different Type of Blockbuster appeared first on Den of Geek.