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A billionaire who dresses up as a bat to  strike fear into the hearts of evildoers  is back on the streets of Gotham. This time Robert Pattinson is in the batsuit in the sixth film featuring the caped crusader in the last decade alone. So, why is this a franchise that continues to draw audiences, and new actors, to the character and his supporting cast?

The early batman character on screen

Batman has been on screen in numerous iterations since the 1940s but audiences seem to not have had enough quite yet. The Batman  sold US$8 million (£6 million) worth of tickets  worldwide on the first day of sale and earned US$128.5 million  on its opening weekend.

From the campy sixties Batman to the darker later versions, each Batman film is a curious cultural artefact reflecting the time in which it was made. It is maybe how they have changed with the times, allowing for  an idiosyncratic vision of the Dark Knight  by each director, that offers plenty of variety within a single franchise. If a fan of the character went to see a Batman film in each of the last four decades, they would see a different kind of movie that reflected the different eras of production, offering plenty of variety within a single franchise.

The two Batman serials released in 1940s cinemas followed in the filmed tradition of other comic book heroes of the time, such as Flash Gordon and The Phantom. They were  episodic adventures  that spoke to contemporary  second world war paranoia about Japanese spies and new technology.

Equally episodic were the big and small screen adventures of Batman in the sixties. The Batman series was closely tied to  its era, featuring references to pop culture, and appearances by pop stars. It also had the  camp sensibilities that were developed in 1950s comics.

While the more tongue-in-cheek TV series is lambasted by fans who prefer a more serious Batman, this was in keeping with a comic where  the caped crusader fought oversized gorillas, found himself turned into a giant or covered in zebra stripes. This is when the superhero received his  first feature length film. Released in 1966 between the end of the first series of Batman on TV and before the start of the second, the film shared  the same cast, writer and director as many of the episodes.

Batman from the eighties and nineties

Batman returned on screen in the eighties and nineties shaped by the distinct visions of different directors.

Tim Burton was the first director to show Batman (this time Michael Keaton) as a brooding, dark millionaire with a tragic origin story that spurs him on to seek justice and vengeance. ‵þ²¹³Ù³¾²¹²Ô (1989)  and ‵þ²¹³Ù³¾²¹²Ô Returns (1992) showcase the director’s interest in the “violent and graphic nature of certain fairy tales” (Kate Warren). Audiences would find out the origin of the Penguin in the sequel, which was like something out of the German children’s story  S³Ù°ù³Ü·É·É±ð±ô±è±ð³Ù±ð°ù  – an orphan thrown into the sewers, to be raised by  escapees from an abandoned zoo.

Burton’s films also reflect a generation when  Batman comics were drawn by idiosyncratic creators  such as  Frank Miller and Marshall Rogers, who the film’s writer credits as influences. And Batman’s production design in turn influenced the contemporary  Detective Comics, a topic I examined in the journal Studies in Comics, detailing how Anton Furst’s drawings were incorporated into the monthly Bat-titles in print during the 1990s.

The late eighties and early nineties were also a period where cinema adopted the  chiaroscuro (high contrast lighting) and fashion of pop videos, which is reflected somewhat in the Bat-films of this period. The  writer Kay Dickinson noted the “MTV aesthetic” in Batman Forever.

You can see this influence on Burton’s films with prominent sequences scored by Prince  and Siouxsie and the Banshees. 'Partyman' by Prince is used in full in Batman for a pseudo musical number featuring the Joker.

In contrast, Burton’s successor leaned back towards the camp and bright colour scheme of 1966. Joel Schumacher’s  Batman Forever (1995)  and ‵þ²¹³Ù³¾²¹²Ô and Robin (1997),  starring Val Kilmer and George Clooney respectively, were considerably more “garish, neon-coloured, in-your-face” than the previous two films (Sara Century, The Observer). This perhaps goes hand-in-hand with greater  LGBTQ+ visibility in nineties cinema  and before the more po-faced Bat-films of the twenty-first century gave Batman and Robin a  “defiantly queer victory lap” (Glen Weldon).

However, many fans consider the 1997 sequel as  “the worst film of all time”. One critic, Kwame Opam, called it “so bad as to be utterly incoherent”. Because of this, the franchise would follow a similar pattern to contemporary Bond movies, in which  a “silly but entertaining” (Edgar Chaput) film  was followed by  a gritty reboot  as Christopher Nolan seized the reins.

The batman films of the twenty-first century

Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy (2005-2012)  brought  a degree of realism  to his vision of The Dark Knight, while still being somewhat demented when portraying familiar villains. This was a period when superhero films would reflect contemporary concerns about the “threat of terrorism or the financial crisis" (Ryan Lambie).

Not wishing to lose this quality, the first  three films featuring Ben Affleck’s Batman  kept  a hint of darkness  while also interacting with more colourful DC Comics characters in ‵þ²¹³Ù³¾²¹²Ô v Superman, The Suicide Squad  a²Ô»å&²Ô²ú²õ±è; The Justice League. However, the overall look and tone of these films were designed to contrast with the “broadly appealing pop sensibility” of contemporary Marvel films, with director Zach Snyder’s vision suggesting “negative, bleak, or cynical outcomes [make] more authentic fiction” (Alan Zilberman; Shaun Huston). With such variance in tone between appearances, it is perhaps no surprise that a pre-teen Bruce Wayne should appear in the Martin Scorsese inspired The Joker film. Each director of a film set in Gotham City brings a quite different vision to the screen.

The Batman director Matt Reeves has a reputation for juggling  a sense of realism  with a comic book aesthetic, having worked on two critically acclaimed Planet of the Apes movies while still bringing back the "Dick Tracy prosthetics" of the nineties Bat-films (AA Dowd). All the gadgets and gear is there but, as critic Christy Lemire  notes, Reeve’s take is more of a “70s crime drama than a soaring and transporting blockbuster”.

So it seems this iteration is  a contemporary remix, which sits somewhere  between the pop sensibilities of certain instalments, and the neo-noir of others. Pattinson has also been  praised by Simran Hans in The Observer for playing a Batman "with an appealing vulnerability, a well-meaning philanthropist buckling under the weight of white guilt”  – a Batman for our times.

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Alex Fitch is a comics historian and PhD research student in comics history and culture, working with ÇÑ×ÓÊÓƵ architecture researchers to understand space and cityscapes in graphic novels and comic books.

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