In the Batman canon, The Clown Prince of Crime has yet to appear in Gotham City. Barry Keoghan makes a fleeting appearance in the movie as a character who is obviously the Joker. The movie even makes a passing reference to a past relationship between this Joker and Robert Pattinson’s Batman, despite the villain being imprisoned and sporting multiple scars. The Joker hasn’t quite reached that stage yet, so that doesn’t necessarily mean Batman has actually faced him.
In a recent video exploring the deleted sequence with more of Keoghan and Pattinson, The Batman director Matt Reeves clarifies this. Reeves sought to prove that several of the most notorious villains in Gotham were already present and causing some problems in the city. They definitely have a past together, but this is only the beginning of the story of this Joker. Reeves hinted about the possibility of becoming the Clown Prince of Crime in a future movie, and with that change and a suspected escape from Arkham, the Batman might have to face him there. As Reeves clarifies
“In trying to sort of begin a new Year 2 Gotham, I think what I wanted to do was make it seem as like all of these characters from Gotham that we are familiar with already sort of exist. And this is the character who will eventually become the Joker but is not yet the Joker. And I wanted Batman to have a confrontation with him that led to him being imprisoned in Arkham. So, something happened in that first year, and they have a relationship from the start, and I wanted this version of the character to go all the way back to Conrad Veidt in the silent movie The Man Who Laughs, which served as the idea for the original Bob Kane, Bill Finger. He has a degenerative illness, thus his face is permanently fixed in a smile, similar to the Phantom of the Opera.”
