In anticipation of the upcoming digital and home release, the first 10 minutes of The Batman are now available for all to see. Released by Warner Bros. Italia, the opening sequence introduces us first to a very different take on supervillain, The Riddler, who has been imagined as a Se7en-style serial killer, before marking the debut of Robert Pattinson as The Dark Knight.

These first 10 minutes of The Batman quickly let us know that this is a different kind of comic book movie. Grimy, dark, and genuinely terrifying, the sequence was designed to be both jarring and communicate the movie’s detective story, as Robert Pattinson previously explained. "I watched a rough cut of the movie by myself. And the first shot is so jarring from any other Batman movie that it's just kind of a totally different pace,” Pattinson said.

“It was what [filmmaker] Matt [Reeves] was saying from the first meeting I had with him: 'I want to do a '70s noir detective story, like The Conversation.' And I kind of assumed that meant the mood board or something, the look of it,” the actor continued. “But from the first shot, it's, 'Oh, this actually is a detective story.' And I feel like an idiot, because I didn't even know that Batman was 'the world's greatest detective'; I hadn't heard that in my life before-but it really plays. Just 'cause there's a lot of stuff where he's in amongst the cops."

The Batman Will Be Available Digitally Later This Month

Batman looking at the Bat-signal
Warner Bros.

Having been met with praise from both critics and audiences alike, as well as earning over $736 million at the box office, The Batman is now set to release for digital download, as well as streaming on HBO Max, on April 18, 2022. The Batman will then air on HBO on April 23, before being released on Ultra HD Blu-ray, Blu-ray, and DVD by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment on May 24.

The Blu-ray release will include a variety of special features, including “Vengeance In The Making,” “The Batman: Genesis,” “Becoming Catwoman,” “Anatomy of The Car Chase,” “A Transformation: The Penguin,” and “The Batmobile,” as well as deleted scenes such as the previously released sequence featuring Barry Keoghan’s early version of The Joker.

Starring Robert Pattinson (Tenet, The Lighthouse), Zoë Kravitz (Big Little Lies, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald), Paul Dano (Love & Mercy, 12 Years a Slave), Jeffrey Wright (No Time to Die, Westworld), John Turturro (the Transformers films, The Plot Against America), Peter Sarsgaard (The Magnificent Seven, Interrogation), Jayme Lawson (Farewell Amor), Andy Serkis (the Planet of the Apes films, Black Panther), and Colin Farrell (The Gentlemen, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them), The Batman is set two years into Bruce Wayne’s career as a vigilante.

When a killer targets Gotham's elite with a series of sadistic machinations, a trail of cryptic clues sends the World's Greatest Detective on an investigation into the underworld, where he encounters such characters as Selina Kyle/aka Catwoman, Oswald Cobblepot/aka the Penguin, Carmine Falcone, and Edward Nashton/aka the Riddler. As the evidence begins to lead closer to home and the scale of the perpetrator's plans becomes clear, Batman must forge new relationships, unmask the culprit, and bring justice to the abuse of power and corruption that has long plagued Gotham City.