Yahoo Movies All the Batman movies, ranked
"I've buried 14 Batmen," says Steve Coogan's emotional Michael Caine in The Trip To Italy. "I'm not going to bury another nylon cloak."
And it's true: there have been a few Batmen passing through over the years. 11, in fact, so far. We've watched them all and put them in order of ascending greatness, just for you. (Or descending rubbishness, if you're a glass-half-empty kind of person, like Batman.)
11. Batman & Robin (1997)
Occasionally a film's astronomical budget and hype can overwhelm it on initial release, prompting the critics to sharpen knives and audiences to switch off. Sometimes it takes time for a film to breathe and let the dust settle. Unfortunately this isn't the case for Batman & Robin – 20 years down the line it's still a steaming pile on repeat viewing.
Joel Schumacher's second and final Batman entry serves up excruciating one-liners from Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr Freeze, a plot trajectory lazily rehashed from its predecessor and a gaudy neon aesthetic that's completely at odds with the Dark Knight's comic roots.
Batman & Robin represents Hollywood franchising at its very worst. Everything about it feels compromised by studio focus groups and corporate tie-ins, as if its makers were desperate for their property to appeal to every possible target audience.
The film was so bad it killed the Batman film series for eight years. Miraculously, George Clooney made it out in one piece, but those nipples still haunt him (and us).
10. Batman Forever (1995)
You can sense the franchise's seeds of destruction being planted throughout, though, as the movie becomes increasingly overstuffed with characters and hardware seemingly designed to spin off into toy lines.
Chris O'Donnell is too old to really convince as the moody teen Dick Grayson, while Tommy Lee Jones's disdain for Jim Carrey (they played Two-Face and The Riddler respectively) is palpable. He really cannot sanction his buffoonery.
9. Batman: The Movie (1966)
The '60s saw a seismic change of American culture, and the Batman TV series and subsequent movie reflected this in its pop art-inspired visuals and freewheeling comedic tone.
Adam West and Burt Ward continued their small-screen adventures in this 1966 movie, and despite all its flaws and how un-Batmany it feels today, it's still a fairly enjoyable romp. There are shades of Bond-style Cold War concerns in Lee Meriwether's duplicitous Russian Miss Kitka (she's Catwoman, natch) and the preposterous plot to dehydrate members of the UN, while two of the set pieces – Batman battling off a shark clamped to his leg and his hilarious attempt to dispose of a bomb – are still some of the series' most memorable.
This film is certainly no masterpiece, but it helped to plant Batman's flag in the pop cultural landscape. It's an important moment in the character's history, because everything that came after was almost a direct reaction against it. Batman wouldn't have been examined so brilliantly by Frank Miller and Tim Burton in the '80s had it not been for this.
8. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
The marmite crusader: overly dark and angsty or spectacular superhero bombast? To be fair to Ben Affleck, his much-maligned Batfleck is a rounded character, if leaning hard into the anger inherent in wearing the batcape these days, and the spectacle is spectacular. It's a Big Movie.
But when all's said and done, villain Lex Luthor is annoying and Wonder Woman steals the show, which doesn't say much for its titular leads.
7. Batman Returns (1992)
The runaway box office success of Tim Burton's Batman in the summer of 1989 (more on that later) meant that Warner Bros had a red-hot franchise on its hands.
After initially dismissing the idea of coming back for a sequel, Burton returned when he was granted creative control and the result is a film that sees him indulge all his darkly gothic whims.
Michael Keaton, excellent again in the dual role of Bruce and Batman, is relegated to a supporting player in his own movie as Burton veers off into the worlds of the Penguin (Danny DeVito), Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Max Schreck (Christopher Walken).
This is well and truly A Tim Burton Picture, with Johnny Depp the only missing ingredient. It's dark, weird and probably the least accessible Batman film on initial viewing. All of its director's idiosyncrasies – for better or worse – are out in full force, and this doesn't necessarily make for a great Batman movie.
6. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
The Dark Knight was always going to be a difficult film to follow, and that proved to be the case with Christopher Nolan's trilogy closer in 2012.
Things come full-circle as the League of Shadows – the terrorist group who helped shape Bruce Wayne into Batman – return to haunt Gotham under the leadership of Tom Hardy's mumbly villain Bane.
The thematic seeds planted in Batman Begins, of Bruce creating a symbol of hope for Gotham, are fully realised in the final scene as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's cop John Blake enters the Batcave, presumably to take on the cape and cowl.
It's Gordon-Levitt and Anne Hathaway (as the limber Selina Kyle) who are the biggest surprises of this film, but on revisiting it's a piece that's riddled with many minor problems. Bane's vocal issues are well-documented, and supporting players Marion Cotillard and Michael Caine get short shrift in terms of screen time.
It's overlong, too, with one-too-many thundering action sequences, spectacle taking precedent over character. Still, as a full stop on the Bale/Nolan era it more than does the job.
5. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)
Sandwiched between the release of Batman Returns and Batman Forever, the theatrically-released animation Mask of the Phantasm was a worthy addition to the character's cinematic canon.
A spinoff from Bruce Timm, Paul Dini and Alan Burnett's acclaimed animated series, the storyline dived into Bruce Wayne's past long before Batman Begins, and featured the Dark Knight actually play detective (a rarity on the big screen) as he unravels the mystery of the Phantasm killer.
An engaging and smartly-scripted adventure, this is also a film that carries weightier themes than you'd ever suspect. Bruce Wayne is ultimately a tragic figure, rejecting the chance to have a normal life and letting Batman envelop him after his romance with Andrea Beaumont turns sour.
Excellent voice performances from Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill (both brilliant in the roles of Batman and Joker respectively), and Dana Delany elevate it further.
Released in cinemas on Christmas Day 1993, Mask of the Phantasm bombed at the box office but found a second life on home video. Now, it's rightly heralded as a cinematic highlight for the character.
4. The Lego Batman Movie (2017)
Technically we're cheating: this, after all, is a movie featuring Lego Batman. Yes, he lives in Wayne Manor, dresses up as a bat and fights the Joker and his ilk, but he's made of Lego and also does battle with the forces of Mordor.
But it's a total treat, so we're including it. Will Arnett's growling egomaniac was such a joy in The Lego Movie he got a spin-off of his own, in which Zach Galifianakis' Joker, jealous of Batman's "wanting to fight other villains" rounds up a super-crew of villains from the Phantom Zone to destroy Gotham.
It's full of quirky, loving detail, from Batman's love of microwaved lobster thermidor to the gleefully pants-free Robin and the last-act arrival of Lord Voldemort and the shark from Jaws.
Plus it's way funnier than any of the other Batman films. Obviously.
3. Batman (1989)
At the time of this film's release, Batman was still regarded as a punchline thanks to the high camp of Adam West's TV series.
Frank Miller has revolutionised the character on the comicbook page thanks to The Dark Knight Returns and Year One, and fast-rising director Tim Burton did something similar on the big screen.
Burton ignored square-jawed action hero types like Alec Baldwin and Kurt Russell in favour of his livewire Beetlejuice star Michael Keaton in the title role. Despite much fanboy fury, Keaton eventually proved them all wrong, bringing a complex duality to the part. His brooding superhero was countered by a crackerjack turn from Jack Nicholson as the Joker, and audiences lapped up this new take on an icon.
Just as Christopher Reeve's Superman had brought credibility to the superhero movie some 10 years earlier, Batman reinforced the notion that the genre was capable of appealing to more than just comic book fans.
2. The Dark Knight (2008)
Christopher Nolan's sequel was a transcendent moment for the Caped Crusader, the film where he seemingly surpassed his comicbook roots and came of age as a serious screen character. (Too serious, perhaps.)
At times this felt more like a sprawling Michael Mann crime epic than it did a superhero picture. Nolan used the corruption of Gotham (through gangsters, bent cops and anarchic force-of-nature the Joker) as the backdrop for an explosive story looking at the escalation brought on by Batman's appearance and the cost of his heroism.
Gary Oldman's James Gordon comes into his own here, Aaron Eckhart's tortured Harvey Dent excels as the white knight to Wayne's dark, but most impressive of all is Heath Ledger as the Joker. The wiry, purple-suited villain is utterly terrifying – in Nolan's vision he exists because of Batman, they intertwine in a way that seems perfect when measured next to their decades-old battle across comics, TV and film.
Ledger was awarded a posthumous Oscar for The Dark Knight, but the movie came up short when it came to dishing out major awards. That snub – for a film that earned more than $1 billion and topped many a critic and fans' best of '08 list – is predominately why the Oscars can now have up to ten films in the race for Best Picture.
1. Batman Begins (2005)
When Batman Begins hit cinemas in 2005, the series had been off screen for eight years after the disastrous Batman & Robin. It's hardly a surprise that Warner Bros opted to take a different approach with his comeback, but few could have predicted just how successful it would be, nor the ripple effect it would have across the film industry.
Continuity do-overs were common in comics, but with Batman Begins director Christopher Nolan oversaw the first ever major film franchise reboot. Now you can't escape them.
It follows a young Bruce Wayne as he transforms from nomadic billionaire into Gotham's shadowy protector. Nolan and screenwriter David S Goyer crafted a hero's journey about a man who must face his own deep-seated fears, drawing inspiration from comic storylines The Man Who Falls and The Long Halloween, and films as wide-ranging as On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Man Who Would Be King and Blade Runner for tone and visual texture.
The result is a sweeping Batman origins movie that strikes the perfect balance between soul and spectacle.
Crucial to its success was the casting of Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne. At the time he was a respected character actor, far from the major movie star of today. He came to the role as an unknown quantity to most viewers, but film fans who'd already seen him as American Psycho's Patrick Bateman perhaps knew the level of intensity to expect.
Bale had no celebrity baggage, either, and that allowed audiences to easily invest in him. His performance brought new dimensions to Wayne; three distinct personas vied for screen time – the playboy Wayne façade, his costumed alter-ego, and the 'real' Bruce seen only by Alfred (Michael Caine) and Rachel (Katie Holmes).
The caped crusader has so often been eclipsed by his rogue's gallery on the big screen, but here he's finally front and centre of his own movie. Batman Begins is actually about Batman, and it's a spectacular work that gets right to the heart of Bob Kane and Bill Finger's creation. If you've never seen a Batman film before, this is where to start.
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