Suggestions for What 2001 Movie the Waynes Saw Before They Died in ‘The Batman’ Are Priceless

The Batman has ushered in quite the conversation online. From talking about how the Riddler was an incel to the Penguin yelling at Batman and Gordon for not knowing Spanish, the movie was hilarious and a perfect Batman movie all rolled into one. But there are also some … smaller moments that the internet wants to talk about, and it’s one of the weirder things we’ve decided to do.

Well, folks, the internet is at it again—this time, trying to figure out what movie the Wayne family saw before they were shot and killed in front of Bruce, given the movie’s timeline. Because even if we don’t see Martha and Thomas Wayne get shot and the pearls hit the ground, we still have theories about what was going on when they were killed.

In the lore of Batman, the Waynes were typically seeing a movie about Zorro on their fateful night out. With the exception being the Christopher Nolan’s movies, they come from some kind of movie about the legend and are killed outside the theater as Bruce Wayne watches. But since we were finally spared from watching their deaths for the 8th time in The Batman, and this Batman theoretically would have been a kid in the early 2000s, fans are now theorizing on what movie it would be.

CNN’s Josh Billinson pointed out that if the movie were to take place at the current time, then it would put the murder of Martha and Thomas Wayne in 2001—which, as Billinson points out, was the year that the movie Shrek was released.

Other suggestions included Zoolander and … A Shark’s Tale? Weird that no one suggested the October 5, 2001-released film Legally Blonde. What? You don’t think that Bruce would love Elle Woods?

While we know that the Waynes were killed in the fall, and we think it was in 2001, I have a suggestion that became an obsession of mine as a young 9 year old girl: the movie Hard Ball.

Hear me out: What about Hard Ball?

I believe that many of us have gone through a Keanu Reeves stage, and while I was deep in my obsession with The Matrix, the 2001 movie Hard Ball came out. Remember when Keanu Reeves busts into a bar singing “Big Poppa” by Notorious B.I.G. because the little league team he’s coaching won a game?

Would the Wayne family go and see Hard Ball? I’d say yes. I, in my dream world, hope that Bruce Wayne saw The Matrix and begged his parents to take him to any and all Keanu Reeves movies. That’d be a perfect world and one that I want to see for Gotham.

In reality, it was probably some re-release of The Mask of Zorro a few years later or something, but we like to have fun on Twitter—especially when it comes to our sad boy Bruce Wayne. So, he might not have gone to see Hard Ball or Shrek, but he did go to the movies in 2001, and on that fateful night, his parents were killed before him. And maybe, just maybe, they went to see Legally Blonde and Bruce was saying, “What, like it’s hard?” right before someone killed his parents.

(via Yahoo!, image: Warner Bros.)