the Riddler's murderous plans to Saw.
While many audiences were already aware that the movie would follow Batman unraveling a game of cat and mouse laid out for him by his nemesis The Riddler, there was no way of knowing just how expansive of a trip the movie would be down the aisles of some of Batman's greatest stories. There are deliberate references to Zero Year, No Man's Land, The Long Halloween, and Grant Morrison's Batman epic, just to name a few, and all of them go a long way in helping drive the world forward and giving Reeves a lot of room to play in. While a sequel hasn't yet been confirmed, there's no doubt that this movie sets up directions that a sequel to The Batman could go in.
Part of that setup is an idea of who Batman might face off against in The Batman 2, and if this first installment is any indication, there are a lot of avenues to be explored. But arguably the most striking tease is a very deliberate change to the origin of Thomas Elliot, the villain Hush, making his vendetta against the Waynes a lot more justifiable. In the comics, Tommy Elliot is a successful surgeon who moonlights as the supervillain Hush, wearing a face of surgical bandages so as to hide his identity from Batman. Thomas and Bruce grew up as close childhood friends, but unlike Bruce, Tommy resented his parents and concocted a scheme to kill them in a car accident. However, thanks to Thomas Wayne's skills as a surgeon, Thomas was able to save the life of Elliot's mother, shattering his plan of securing his inheritance early and causing him to resent Bruce Wayne, a deeply rooted vendetta that inspired his turn towards villainy. In The Batman, Hush's backstory sees a significant change from the comic imagining, which removes Tommy murdering his own parents and instead gives him an even more valid reason to despite the Wayne family.
The movie (and one of the tie-in websites for The Batman) turns the comic plot on its head, introducing the audience to a character named Edmund Elliot, an investigative reporter responsible for discovering some unsavory information regarding Martha Wayne's family history as an Arkham. Elliot intended to release the information while Thomas Wayne was running for mayor, effectively sabotaging his campaign, until Thomas Wayne turned to Carmine Falcone for help in dealing with the problem, unaware that Falcone would end up killing the man.
While the movie never directly confirms that Edmund Elliot is Thomas Elliot's father, the emphasis on the word "HUSH" in the video released to the media by The Riddler has to be more than a throwaway reference by Matt Reeves. Regardless of whether or not Hush is explicitly shown, Reeves seems to be suggesting that Thomas Elliot is alive in this universe, and if he were to become a villain, it would arguably be more of a direct fault of the Wayne family's than it is in the comics. The Batman already forces Bruce to reckon with the immoral implications of his father's legacy (something that 2019's Joker movie also attempted), and introducing a version of Hush whose father was murdered by Bruce's father would only take that familial guilt even further.
