As a child, a young Bruce Wayne witnesses the death of his parents at the hands of a crazed criminal. As an adult, Bruce travels the world seeking the means to fight injustice. He lives amongst the boroughs of criminals and thieves in central Asia. Eventually, he meets a mysterious figure named Ra's Al Guhl and joins his gang called the League of Shadows. Using his training, he is able to defeat his trainer. Finally meeting up with his estate caretaker Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham. There, he becomes the new head of Wayne Enterprises. Together, with the help of the C.E.O. of the Wayne Enterprises Applied Sciences division, a man name Lucius Fox, he dons a new persona: Batman. As Batman takes on the criminals and organized crime underworld of Gotham, a sinister new underbelly of the city is exposed, and a new class of criminal is born. Will Batman be the one to stop them all, or does Gotham need a hero with a face?
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Christian Bale spent two movies complaining that the Batsuit's neck piece didn't let him turn his head, so for this one the costume team finally built in an articulated neck. There's even a little in-joke moment where Lucius Fox tells Bruce the new suit lets him 'turn his head' - a wink at exactly that gripe.
Cillian Murphy played Scarecrow and Tom Hardy played Bane in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, and both ended up leading rival factions in Peaky Blinders. Murphy even popped up briefly in The Dark Knight Rises alongside Hardy, so the overlap runs deeper than just the casting choice.
There's apparently a tradition of Batman actors passing down survival tips. Pattinson got advice from Christian Bale, and Kravitz got hers from Michelle Pfeiffer, and it all boiled down to the same practical thing: figure out how you're going to use the toilet while wearing that suit.
There's a neat pattern running through all three films: the main villain hides in plain sight disguised as one of their own minions at some point, Ra's al Ghul in Batman Begins, the Joker in The Dark Knight, and Bane in Rises. Easy to miss unless you're watching for it.
Before Nolan ever got his hands on the franchise, Darren Aronofsky (yes, the Black Swan guy) was attached to reboot it with a wild pitch: a homeless teenage Bruce Wayne working in a Gotham garage, an elderly Clint Eastwood as Batman, and Hong Kong standing in for Gotham City entirely. Warner Bros passed, and honestly, fair enough.
You'd assume the guy who made the gritty Dark Knight trilogy grew up loving Tim Burton's moody 1989 Batman, but nope. Nolan's actual childhood love was the campy 1966 Adam West show, along with the Denny O'Neil comics and Frank Miller's graphic novels he devoured as a teenager.
Nolan and co-writer David S. Goyer treated the screenplay like classified material. They wrote it in Nolan's own garage, and Warner Bros executives weren't even given a copy to take away — they had to physically show up to the garage and read it with Nolan and Goyer sitting right there.
Nolan screened Ridley Scott's Blade Runner for his crew before production started, then reportedly turned around afterward and said something like 'this is how we're going to make Batman.' He's talked about how much he admired the way that film built a lived-in world without ever spelling out its edges.
Most big productions run a second camera unit to pick up establishing shots and background action while the main crew focuses elsewhere. Nolan didn't want that on Batman Begins — he shot the entire film with a single unit so he personally oversaw every shot from storyboard to final cut.
Christian Bale wasn't the only name on Nolan's shortlist for Bruce Wayne. Keanu Reeves, Jake Gyllenhaal, Joshua Jackson, Eion Bailey, Hugh Dancy, Billy Crudup, and even a young Henry Cavill were all in the mix at some point before Bale locked it down.
