It has been 21 years since DC started a new Batman era, and what happened next changed the Caped Crusader forever. Batman was always one of the most popular DC characters in movies and TV thanks to the classic Adam West series, the countless cartoons throughout the years, and the four movies released from 1989 to 1997 by filmmakers Tim Burton (Batman, Batman Returns) and Joel Schumacher (Batman Forever, Batman & Robin). However, those last two movies seemed to end the franchise, with Batman & Robin ridiculed even by its two main cast members, George Clooney (Batman) and Chris O’Donnell (Robin).
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However, something amazing happened when the next Batman movie arrived eight years later. Warner Bros. brought on director Christopher Nolan, fresh off his breakout movie Memento (2000) and impressive follow-up Insomnia (2002). Nolan then revived the franchise and changed how DC movies looked for the next decade by rewriting all the rules.
Christopher Nolan Changed How DC Movies Looked
When Christopher Nolan came in, the DC movie world was in shambles. While Batman was the biggest property throughout the 1990s, it was also all that Warner Bros. relied on when it came to big-budget comic book movies that were successful. The only other movie released in the 1990s from DC was Steel, and that was a massive failure as merely a Shaquille O’Neal feature. The Tim Burton and Kevin Smith Superman movie died in development, and when Batman & Robin ended up as a critical failure, it ended the franchise for a long time.
The 2000s started off with Catwoman, which was both a critical and commercial failure, and Constantine, which didn’t look like a DC movie at all and was unfairly criticized for not following the source material more closely. While the latter movie has since become a cult classic thanks to positive reappraisals, the future looked bleak for DC. Marvel was seeing success with Spider-Man and the X-Men, and even commercial success with the Fantastic Four. DC was striking out at a considerable pace. Then Batman Begins changed everything.
Nolan decided he didn’t want to make a generic superhero movie. Even as Spider-Man and the X-Men were thrilling audiences, they were still just stories about costumed heroes fighting costumed supervillains. It filled the niche and scratched the itch for comic book fans, but Nolan had higher aspirations. He created Batman Begins, which checked in at over two hours and spent the first hour just watching Bruce Wayne train to become a hero. Batman didn’t even show up until an hour into the movie. What resulted was a release unlike any superhero movie made up to that point.
The first two Batman movies by Tim Burton were gothic noir with clear expressionist leanings on Gotham City’s architecture and design. It was also dark and deadly, but in a more comic way. Joel Schumacher came in and made the movies colorful and vibrant, making films more for kids and creating over-the-top, often ridiculous villains for Batman and Robin to face. Christopher Nolan looked at both of those styles and went in the opposite direction. Out was the gothic noir of Burton and the over-the-top nature of Schumacher, and Nolan chose to create a movie that made it look like Batman existed in the real world. It completely changed how Warner Bros. made superhero movies.
Batman Begins Led to the Best DC Superhero Movie of All Time
This led to Nolan creating his superhero masterpiece. Batman Begins was a great movie, with a good story and incredible atmosphere. While Gotham City was still its own world and unlike any city in America, Nolan fought to keep his Batman in a society that wasn’t over the top and cartoony in any way. He sought realism, or at least as much realism as a movie about a man who dresses up as a bat could have. With The Dark Knight, Nolan fulfilled this mission, and it hit on all cylinders. This was DC’s crime epic, a superhero movie that could live in a world created by someone like Martin Scorsese. It was a spectacle, but also a grounded movie about a man fighting to keep his city safe.
Everything changed when The Dark Knight came out. It seems almost hard to believe, but The Dark Knight was widely regarded as the best superhero movie ever made and was listed in best movie lists in the exact same year that Marvel released its first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Iron Man. Each movie received praise, and each delivered something different to comic book fans. Iron Man was for pure comic book fans who wanted to see their heroes transported to the big screen. The Dark Knight was for movie fans who wanted to see a superhero in a movie that transcended the genre. Both movies changed their individual brands.
While Iron Man led to the interconnected MCU, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight caused Warner Bros. to want to go more serious in its future movies. The MCU went for fun, and Warner Bros. finished up Nolan’s Batman movies with The Dark Knight Rises, while also putting out the more serious Watchmen. With Zack Snyder’s critical success on Watchmen, Warner chose to have him follow Nolan’s footsteps, but while Nolan intrinsically added a superhero into a dark, crime-ridden world, Snyder just focused on the darkness around the heroes. While Snyder has his fans, his movies never reached the same level as those Nolan released. It was 21 years ago that Batman Begins changed the way DC made movies, and the company still hasn’t replicated it since Christopher Nolan left the genre.
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