Soderbergh is finishing The Batman Part II — this director swap is the opposite of Justice League
DC fans have watched a mid-shoot director swap wreck a film before. This time the stand-in's stated goal is footage nobody will ever be able to spot.
Steven Soderbergh is stepping in on The Batman Part II for the last weeks of the shoot. Deadline broke the news late on 15 October 2026: production had been paused while Matt Reeves attends to an ongoing family matter, and Soderbergh, a longtime admirer of his work, offered to help finish principal photography. Reeves answered the obvious question on X within hours.
"Just to be clear, I am not leaving The Batman Part II. I am profoundly grateful to Steven for coming to my aid during this challenging time to help me finish principal photography."
— Matt Reeves, on X
The plan is long-distance. Soderbergh shoots in London, Reeves stays in Los Angeles, the two remain in contact until filming wraps, and Reeves takes over post-production when he is ready to return. The film is said to be about two-thirds done, and Warner Bros. is still pointing at 18 February 2028.
The ghost of 2017
Every DC fan heard "director change" and flinched. Fair enough: in 2017 Zack Snyder left Justice League after a family tragedy, Joss Whedon came in for rewrites and reshoots, and much of Snyder's footage ended up on the cutting-room floor. Critics panned the result. Fans campaigned until Zack Snyder's Justice League, all four hours of it, arrived on HBO Max on 18 March 2021.
Side by side, the two barely rhyme:
- Who made the call: Whedon was the studio's replacement. Soderbergh approached Reeves himself, according to the studio's own statement.
- Who stays: Snyder left the film. Reeves hasn't, and has said so in writing.
- Who edits: Whedon reshaped Snyder's film. Reeves keeps the edit suite: post-production is his.
- How much is left: Whedon rebuilt a film. Soderbergh is finishing one that is mostly in the can.
That is the difference between a takeover and a favour. One produces a "version". The other produces a finished film with one director's name on it.
A director whose job is to disappear
Soderbergh's statement reads like a job description, and the job is to leave no fingerprints. He praises the first film before saying a word about himself.
"I thought Matt Reeves' work on The Batman was stunning; it was intentional, specific, and rigorously coherent. 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."
— Steven Soderbergh, in a statement
He has done exactly this before. In 2011 he shot about two days of second-unit footage on The Hunger Games as a favour to Gary Ross, and described the brief as duplicating precisely what Ross and cinematographer Tom Stern were doing. He later admitted the wait to hear whether Ross liked it was nerve-racking. An Oscar winner for Traffic, nervous about blending in: the right temperament for this gig.
If nobody can point to the Soderbergh scenes in February 2028, the plan has worked.
The r/movies thread agrees. "If there was any director that could come in and work in Reeves' vision its Soderbergh," reads one of the top replies: "a best case scenario instead of having to delay it more."
What could still go wrong
The risk is time, not taste. The sequel has already slipped from 2 October 2026 to 1 October 2027 and then to February 2028, and nobody has said whether this pause moves it again. Robert Pattinson, Scarlett Johansson and Sebastian Stan now finish the shoot with their director on another continent.
DC has history here beyond Snyder: Richard Donner was replaced by Richard Lester on Superman II, and fans have argued for decades about who shot what. The best result for The Batman Part II is that nobody ever has that argument. No hashtag, no four-hour cut. Just Reeves' film, finished by a friend.