With the release of Matt Reeves’ The Batman now just three months away, and the debut of yet another (this-time Catwoman-focused) trailer this week, we’re starting to get a pretty decent picture of how the new dark knight will return to multiplexes. Reeves promised us a vision of the caped crusader re-engaging with the traditional role of “world’s greatest detective” in which he’s often seen in the comics (not to mention the bravura 90s Batman: The Animated Series TV show), and it seems Bruce Wayne will be plunged into a Seven-esque race against time to stop Paul Dano’s Riddler from completing a murderous spree. It’s a fascinating proposition for those of us who love the character first introduced by Bob Kane and Bill Finger in 1939 so much that we would happily sit through just about any Batman movie (provided it isn’t one in which our hero starts wielding guns and trying to take down Superman). The problem for Reeves is that he needs to do better than this. Why? Because Jon Watts’s Spider-Man trilogy has just shown everyone exactly how to bring back a superhero nobody was that impatient to see again. Only seven years ago, after the anticlimactic events of 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the idea of the masked wallcrawler once again being top of the superhero tree for Christmas was almost impossible to imagine. After the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Peter Parker is the coolest thing in comic book movies since Samuel L Jackson was cast as Nick Fury. But Watts got pretty lucky. Peter Parker’s introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe via his startling cameo in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War allowed the film-maker to completely avoid the tired old Spidey origins story played out in Sam Raimi’s original 2002 Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man. Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017 then took advantage of the character’s newly confident position within the MCU by teaming him up with Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man for what turned out to be an inspired, odd-couple pairing. Furthermore, Watts gave us a completely new take on Aunt May, banished both Spidey’s regular comic book squeezes (Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy) and delivered a much sillier, far more charming and insouciant (not to mention suitably diverse) take on Midtown High School. The question now is quite how Reeves is going to freshen up Batman without having any of the same tools at his disposal. The film-maker has already confirmed that his take on Gotham’s dark knight will not be living in the DC extended universe, so is unlikely to ever meet Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, Jason Momoa’s Aquaman or Ray Fisher’s Cyborg. Nobody will be taking bets just now on Ezra Miller’s The Flash showing up at some point, given his film, due in November, will dive deep into the DC multiverse and could theoretically end up meeting Adam West’s version of Bats if Warner Bros really feel like making it happen. But the chances are that this Robert Pattinson’s Gotham City will be one in which the caped crusader is going to be working on his own. So where exactly is the excuse going to come from for bringing Batman back for his sixth incarnation in three decades? It can’t just be that nobody could possibly be as bad in the cape and cowl as Ben Affleck, surely? A look at the latest trailer certainly suggests Dano’s Riddler will bear little resemblance to Jim Carrey’s irritating emerald-suited puzzler-poser. But will the challenge he presents to Bruce Wayne really be so different from the anarchic, unhinged threat of Heath Ledger’s Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight? We’ve already witnessed Catwoman in two Batman live action movies, 1992’s Batman Returns and 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, so how will Zoë Kravitz’s differ? She certainly has more feline-related japes up her sleeve than the relatively reserved Anne Hathaway in Nolan’s film, but are wisecracks about having nine lives really so different to Michelle Pfeiffer’s PVC-coated, pun-wielding turn all those years ago? For those of us who are Batman obsessives, these little details probably don’t matter. But for the wider cinemagoing public, Reeves will need to prove he’s giving us a Gotham City we haven’t seen many times before. Could the Riddler’s campaign against Batman be something to do with the sins of his father, as has been heavily hinted in previous trailers? Oops, we’ve already seen evil Thomas Wayne in the recent Joker. No doubt Reeves will find a fresh way to dig into the Wayne family’s past. He will certainly need to do so if The Batman is to escape the geek ghetto and find its way to the kind of wider audience that Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy secured. Let’s hope we’re in for some shocking Bat-twists – for despite what we hardcore caped crusader fanboys might like to think, there are only so many filmgoers ready to lap up new movies about Batman and Catwoman every few years, like bowls of increasingly tepid milk.