PHOTO COURTESY OF WARNER BROS.
Gotham City has never been known as a nice place to live. It’s crime-ridden, kind of gloomy, and has political problems. That doesn’t even include the array of villains who are hell-bent on taking it over, destroying it, robbing it, and committing just about any other crime within its city limits.
And yet, there is some hope in a vigilante who dresses in a bat costume and takes down the evil people that the cops can’t seem to catch.
Bruce Wayne is a troubled man who watched his parents get murdered when he was a child, inheriting their vast wealth and reputation. Bruce Wayne is also Batman, but I’m sure you already knew that. His drive to be a vigilante; someone who could go beyond the police and rid his fair city of the criminal element that stole his parents is what drives every single Batman story.
Over the course of the past 33 years, Batman has been a cinema staple and could arguably be considered the beginning of the comic book movie craze we find ourselves in today. But over its three decades, the core story has changed its perception. Always a little darker than other mainstream comic book movies, Batman has seen many writers and directors come and go, and with them a new and dynamic way to look at the Dark Knight.
Let's take a look at the live-action, major motion pictures, the six actors who've depicted Batman, the villains he fought, and the storylines of the films that made them a successful franchise leading up to this year's installment, The Batman.
NOTE: Any association with any respective graphic novel storylines the movies may be based on won't be analyzed here; we're delving strictly into the Batman's silver screen persona. Also: Spoiler Alert ahead for the older movies, but not 2022's The Batman
Even when Batman premiered in 1989, the character wasn’t new. The comic book had been around for 50 years and Adam West's small screen Batman of the '60s had been enjoyed by plenty of baby boomers who now had young kids interested in the masked vigilante.
Batman is not an origin story; when the film starts he already has his lair, toolbelt and iconic Batman symbol on his chest. The only hints of an origin is in flashbacks of Jack Napier, who becomes the Joker, is seen robbing and murdering Bruce Wayne’s parents.
The only real origin story we get is in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. Not only was it Batman's first, it seems from then on, every superhero needed an origin story. Yet Batman doesn’t really need an origin because most people are aware of the parents' murder, that he has a lot of money, a butler, and a lot of technology to help him become the caped crusader. Strangely, it’s almost irrelevant what happened between being a child traumatized by the murder and becoming the Batman. It seems his mysterious childhood and upbringing don’t lend itself to needing an origin story like many other superhero films.
Once the hero of the film is established in any comic book movie, what then becomes of interest is how their next villain came to be. Conversely, the only time this really didn’t seem to matter was the Joker in The Dark Knight. He merely shows up without a true origin story.
The villains in Batman are often the most compelling. They generally don’t have any magic powers, but they’re flawed humans just like Bruce Wayne. In many of the later films, they want to directly challenge Batman’s power of being Gotham's hero.
Who were the best villains, though? The Joker always seems to be the bad guy everyone loves seeing. It undoubtedly stems from Jack Nicholson’s portrayal in Batman, which couldn’t be beaten. Until Heath Ledger won a posthumous Oscar® for his turn as the Clown Prince of Crime, and then Joaquin Phoenix’s win 11 years after that. Joker represents chaos in a world that Batman is trying to fix, as well as honest attempts of learning about mental health. He also brings out the best in Batman and their opposing ideologies are in direct conflict with one another.
What can writers learn from villain characters in general? In any journey the hero takes, they must reach a low point. All of Batman’s villains serve to bring him to his knees, providing that all is lost moment before he has the capability to rise again.
Six actors have played Bruce Wayne/Batman and each had their own spin on the hero. In the first four films (Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin), the character development was minimal. Throughout the 1990s, the idea of telling a story throughout a series of films was basically unheard of. There was no universe like audiences expect nowadays from Marvel and DC.
This lent itself to a change of direction of the character and minimal arcs within each film. Batman wasn’t necessarily a character who had to learn anything: Pick an actor, put them into the suit, and have him fight bad guys. The villains always changed as did the women in Bruce Wayne’s life. The only constant was Alfred, played by Michael Gough. Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, and George Clooney are all great actors, but in the films throughout the nineties, the comic book movie was more spectacle than about character.
This changed in 2005 with the release of Batman Begins, arguably the film that launched the concept of a multi-film superhero concept. It brings up the question: Had Batman Begins failed, would there be an MCU?
Christian Bale wasn’t a huge name, but he was respected at the time, especially with his turns in American Psycho and The Machinist. But was he Batman? And then there was Christopher Nolan who wowed audiences with Memento and proved he could work with big-name actors in Insomnia. Now he was given a $150 million dollar budget, a highly anticipated and often stalled franchise, and three films to tell his story.
It was an ambitious undertaking that could have easily fallen apart if the pieces didn’t come together perfectly. Therefore, this Batman trilogy had to remove itself entirely from the previous films, and so it became an origin story, showing audiences how Bruce became the Dark Knight and building an evolving character arc and storylines over the span of a series of films. Suddenly, comic book movies were no longer just fun popcorn flicks, but rather well-crafted stories that focused on humanity, morality and depth. Batman was now a three-dimensional character.
After the trilogy concluded, DC couldn’t just replace Bale with a new actor and keep it going. Instead, they aged Batman and placed him into the DC Universe to fight and work alongside Superman. Ben Affleck became the new Batman and created an aging hero who had already fought his way to save Gotham City. While there was plenty of buzz about continuing the franchise with him both in the title role and at the helm, that soon fizzled and he became a transitional Batman, but nonetheless, the right Batman at the right time.
Now it’s time for a new Batman. But after stellar performances and stories, these were suddenly massive black boots to fill. And just like every Batman before him, Robert Pattinson was decried before he was even seen, much less appreciated. The vampire from the young adult, female-crazed Twilight novels-turned-films was going to be the savior of Gotham? There was plenty of worry about Pattinson being Batman. For any doubters though, Tenet — ironically also a Nolan film — proved Pattinson’s ability to take on the role. Nonetheless, this new Batman storyline had to distinguish itself as something different than what came before it, and so Matt Reeves made a darker film that would feel more like a noir detective solving a series of crimes rather than a superhero stopping a villain.
The actors who play superheroes have big shoes to fill. From Spider-Man to Superman to Wonder Woman, there is no grace period. In today’s cinematic universes, they must prove themselves right out the gate. Writers should be aware of this fallacy. The characters can no longer be merely spectacle, but rather they must be layered with full character arcs. They must be new stories and ideas, but still hold the familiarity that audiences expect.
The Batman franchise is notoriously dark, especially the latest film. Its villains are more sinister and violent...perhaps a sign of our times. What is it about a reclusive billionaire who wants to dress as a bat to avenge the city of criminals? Is it the hero or the villains? Is there a deep meaning that resonates with audiences?
At the basic level, Bruce Wayne is a flawed character. He’s an orphan who sees his city getting destroyed by those seeking power and a corrupt police department not living up to their profession, the exception being Commissioner Gordon.
His story changes with each iteration. At first, he was a comic book character in a comic book world. In the later films, we see Bruce Wayne as a person first and how he deals with being a superhero more than we see him being Batman. The later films starring Christian Bale and Robert Pattinson are grounded in reality more so than most other comic book films seem to be. Perhaps that’s what makes these films so prolific; they stand on their own with an expectation that every few years, there will be a new interpretation, with a new actor in the title role.
The Batman certainly is different than its predecessors. It feels less of a Batman film and more of a noir detective film; more of a PG-13 Se7en than Iron Man. It’s a film where every character has a story as compelling as the next and plays like a mystery that Batman, and therefore the audience, wants to solve.
In a world filled with superheroes, Batman seems to always stand out.