Batman is slowly approaching his centenary, with 2039 set to mark a full hundred years since the Dark Knight first prowled the crime-ridden streets of Gotham City. Over that time he’s seen countless adventures in comic books, video games and on television, but it’s the silver screen that’s cemented him as a bona fide pop culture icon.
So, without further ado, let’s list these cinematic caped crusaders!
Lewis Wilson
Gotham’s Dark Knight fights crime in a sweatsuit and a balaclava. The evil Asian villain is played by a white guy who would later get Hollywood legend James Hong fired from a movie for being too Asian. The guys doing the titles aren’t sure if “Batman” is one word or two.
All this and more can be found in 1943’s Batman, the first of Bruce Wayne’s big-screen, live-action adventures. Our first Batman came to us via Lewis Wilson, a 23-year-old working actor whose career never peaked higher than the “played the first Batman” footnote. Featuring high melodrama and exactly the kind of racism that you’re probably imagining, Batman was released in 15 chapters between July and October of 1943. At 260 minutes in length it still feels shorter than The Batman.
Robert Lowery
In 1949, Batman returned to theaters in Batman and Robin, another 15-part serial. Produced by Sam Katzman – think World War II-era Roger Corman – it was cheap, messy, poorly thought out, but kinda fun. This time, 36-year-old Robert Lowery stepped into the lumpy bat suit, going toe-to-toe with an evil inventor called the Wizard.
Adam West
There’s not much in the world that’s more fun than the Adam West Batman series. Chaotically campy and played with a straight-faced earnestness, it’s joyfully goofy. For this iteration’s theatrical film, the CBS Batman show’s main cast returned, along with a good chunk of the rogues’ gallery. Frank Gorshin’s Riddler, Burgess Merideth’s Penguin, and Cesar Romero’s Joker all turned up to chew scenery, while an otherwise occupied Julie Newmar was replaced by Lee Meriwether. The 1966 motion picture remains worth watching nearly 60 years later, and will have you wondering why more evil plans don’t end in the arms of the Penguin’s exploding octopus.
Michael Keaton
A full five decades after the Batman was introduced in the pages of Detective Comics, it was time for fans to put away childish things, focusing on a version of their favorite superhero who was just for big boys. Following Frank Miller’s lead, Tim Burton tried to leave the goofiness of ‘60s-era Batman behind him, giving audiences the first full-throated interpretation of the character in a high-budget movie.
He chose Michael Keaton for the part. Fans were not happy, reportedly sending tens of thousands of angry letters to Warner Bros – an almost quaint amount of complaining by today’s standards, but that’s what things were like back when you had to pay postage every time you wanted to send an angry tweet.
Keaton’s debut was a monster hit, but he bowed out after 1992’s Batman Returns when the studio decided to move in a less emotionally traumatizing direction and canned Burton.
Val Kilmer
Among the briefest tenures in Batman movie history, Val Kilmer only defended the streets of Gotham once, during Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever in 1995. He would go on to give many reasons for leaving the franchise, as would other people involved in the project.
Kilmer said that he felt unappreciated in the role, and that he couldn’t connect with a character who punches all of his problems away. Schumacher said that Kilmer got into a shoving match with him on set. Bad vibes all round. Oh well, next time Schumacher will nail it… right?
George Clooney
The only Batman actor ever to offer to personally refund anyone that saw his movie in theaters, George Clooney took over the role for 1997’s Batman and Robin, a film that’s aged like a fine wine someone opened a glowstick into. Still hot off of the success of ER, Clooney didn’t have much to do in the flick. He mostly stood, stiffly, not turning his head very much. He’s nobody’s favorite Batman. Not even his own. Not even Brad Pitt’s, probably.
Christian Bale
With another decade of goofiness in the rearview, Christopher Nolan pulled a hard reset on Batman, bringing realism (relative to mid-2000s superhero movies) to the franchise. For his series, he’d need an intense, dramatically charged actor – the kind that could sell even the weirdest lines of dialogue from American Psycho, or Newsies, or whatever.
Christian Bale became a generation’s favorite Batman in 2005’s Batman Begins, finally presenting the character as scarred, traumatized, and obsessed with justice to an unhealthy degree. His interpretation proved so popular, that it contributed to WB’s decision to stay out of the MCU-adjacent shared universe model of filmmaking until Bale’s solo Dark Knight story was over.
Ben Affleck
Nerds of a certain age will never forget where they were the day that DC announced that Ben Affleck would be their shared universe’s new Batman. Some of us went “ew.” Others went “huh.”
If Christian Bale’s Batman poked moodily at his oatmeal, Affleck’s threw his bowl across the room and screamed that he wanted Apple Jacks. He was a cranky, angry Batman, branding the criminals that he took down with pictures of his favorite animal. He wasn’t for everybody. Heck, by the end, he wasn’t even for Affleck, who was openly exhausted with the role by the time The Flash came out in 2022.
Robert Pattinson
Taking a step back from trying to make their own MCU, DC released The Batman in 2022, a sort of spiritual successor to the Batman of the Nolan/Bale era. Divorced of shared universe malarkey, he was a young, humorless Batman, all about punching, gravelly voices, and moody Nirvana covers.
Time being a flat circle, DC elected to keep this Batman off in his own universe being moody while they make plans for a different Batman to do group projects with. It was like 2005 through 2012 all over again.
Michael Keaton again
Nostalgia sells, right? Michael Keaton returned to the cape and cowl for The Flash, playing kind-of-sort-of the same Batman that he’d played in Batman and Batman Returns. Early reports had his Bruce Wayne taking over as the DCEU’s Nick Fury analogue, and Keaton had already shot scenes for the studio’s Batgirl film before it was historically and unceremoniously scrapped. The Flash turned out to be an embarrassing disaster. Let’s just hope Keaton got a good payday.
The further adventures of ‘80s Bruce Wayne are doomed to remain unfilmed, but you can read about them in the pages of the comic book Batman ‘89.
George Clooney again
For one glorious, perfect moment in the final frames of 2023’s The Flash, everything made perfect sense. The universe was scrambled by time travel. Everything was weird. Zack Snyder’s obsession with having heroes drop F-bombs finally, just for a second, fit perfectly into the events that occurred on screen. George Clooney’s Batman was back. What the f…
Shot as a bit on the recommendation of new studio co-head James Gunn and representing the troubled picture’s third or fourth ending, The Flash’s final scene sees George Clooney brought back to screens. Canon-wise, it’s unlikely to mean anything moving forward, but darned if it wasn’t an enormous swing by a company that knew that it was about to start over from scratch anyway.
