Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy will always be held up as one of the benchmarks for the comic book genre as a whole and not just Batman’s big screen adventures. After Joel Schumacher’s disastrous Batman & Robin almost killed the franchise entirely, a fresh perspective was desperately needed to bring the Caped Crusader back from the brink of cinematic purgatory.
Everyone on the planet knows the hero’s origin story, and we’ve already seen Thomas and Martha Wayne gunned down on film far too many times, but Batman Begins was the first occasion where Bruce Wayne’s transformation from grieving billionaire playboy to costumed vigilante had ever been made the focal point and driving force of the plot.
The dark and gritty reboot has become so commonplace these days that it can sometimes be too easy to forget the seismic impact that the aforementioned movie had on blockbuster cinema, and in a recent interview, Nolan revealed that he felt as though his take on the iconic superhero came along at exactly the right moment in time.
“It was the right moment in time for the telling of the story I wanted to do. The origin story for Batman had never been addressed in film or fully in the comics. There wasn’t a particular or exact thing we had to follow. There was a gap in movie history. Superman had a very definitive telling with Christopher Reeve and Richard Donner. The version of that with Batman had never been told. We were looking at this telling of an extraordinary figure in an ordinary world.”
Thanks to the lasting legacy of the Dark Knight Trilogy, any subsequent Bat-movies will be trying to actively avoid retelling the character’s origin story because they’ll know full well that they’ll always be compared to Nolan’s work. The hero has already been rebooted twice since The Dark Knight Rises, with Ben Affleck playing a grizzled veteran that’s been on the beat for decades in the DCEU and Robert Pattinson cast as a relatively untested Bruce Wayne in his second year of protecting the streets of Gotham City, and every new Batman flick from now until eternity will inevitably be compared to what Christopher Nolan brought to the franchise.
