The Riddler’s Mysterious Message From ‘The Batman’ Trailer Has Already Been Solved

There is a lot to process in the first trailer for The Batman: Robert Pattinson looking like I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning-era Conor Oberst; the Nirvana song; the Fast and Furious-style Batmobile; Zoe Kravitz’s Catwoman debut; Colin Farrell as the Penguin… or maybe it’s Richard Kind? That would be inspired casting! But don’t overlook this scene.

This shot, one of the few in the trailer that you can see without turning the screen brightness all the way up, shows Jim Gordon (played by Jeffrey Wright) discovering a card left behind by the Riddler (Paul Dano) for Batman at a crime scene. “What does a liar do when he’s dead?” the inside reads, followed by a series of symbols.

Batman has some world’s greatest detective competition, because someone thinks they have decoded the message. “So hyped for Matt Reeve’s Batman Movie, I decided to solve The Riddler’s code,” Andrew Lane wrote on Twitter. He explained his process:

“I first analyzed the different symbols and found the ones that were reoccurring throughout the code. From here, I had two thought processes. I had a feeling that The Riddler may use the word “Batman” so I solved the first part as Batman. This didn’t work because the symbols that I substituted with letters in the first phrase didn’t line up with the same symbols in the second one. So I went to my next thought process, which was replacing the matching symbols in the first phrase with “E” since it is the most used letter in the English language. Then the matching consecutive letters in the second phrase I replaced with a double “L”, because it is the most commonly used consecutive letters in the English language. Then I used the riddle on the right side of the card and the substituted letters to figure out the rest.”

What’s the answer to the riddle? “He lies still,” which, as Lane tweeted, “is a double entendre, because he is literally lying still due to death and also continues to lie after death.” Hm, I prefer, “Riddle me this, riddle me that, who’s afraid of the big, black bat” but this one’s good, too. The Batman is scheduled to come out on October 1, 2021.