Forget Wordle! 'The Batman' superfan shines light on secret Riddler site tied to Matt Reeves reboot

Less than 48 hours after Warner Bros. released the first teaser trailer for The Batman back in the summer of 2020, super-fan Andrew Lane had already cracked one of the Riddler's sinister ciphers. Well, believe it or not he just did it again with about a month to go before the movie finally hits the big screen in the first weekend of March.

This time around, Andrew set his mind to the task of deciphering a brand-new cryptograph from an official tie-in website that's flown under the radar for many fans.

"[It's] been very minimally teased throughout production," Lane tells SYFY WIRE. "The site is http://rataalada.com. It is occasionally updated with new riddles that provide pieces of media, such as a batman suspect sketch, if they are solved correctly. To find this code, I answered the questions, then reloaded the site to get new dialogue and a file containing the code."

The coded message translates into "Expose more of Gotham," which "was quite simple to solve," Lane continues. "I've created a notebook with my own cipher in it, as well as all the previous riddles. I was able to fill out most of the answer, knowing that it said 'e__ose more o_ Gotham.' I deduced through the missing letters in my cipher and just dictionary words that the first word was expose. I then realized that I had the 'f' unsolved for, and knew that must be the last missing letter."

In the film — directed and co-written by Cloverfield and Planet of the Apes veteran Matt Reeves — Edward Nashton/Riddler (Paul Dano) starts murdering high-profile targets as a way to bring the public's attention to the corruption that has turned the city into a den of sin and iniquity. All of it hints at a grand-reaching conspiracy, which is par for the course in the hardboiled detective stories and archetypes that helped inspire the narrative.

“The premise of the movie is that the Riddler is kind of molded in an almost Zodiac Killer sort of mode, and is killing very prominent figures in Gotham, and they are the pillars of society. These are supposedly legitimate figures. It begins with the mayor, and then it escalates from there," Reeves explained to MovieMaker Magazine. "And in the wake of the murders, he reveals the ways in which these people were not everything they said they were, and you start to realize there’s some kind of association."

We'll get to see Bruce Wayne put his own puzzle-solving skills to the test when The Batman opens in theaters everywhere Friday, March 4. Tickets go on sale next Thursday — Feb. 10. To watch a thrilling first look clip posted by Reeves himself, click here.