It’s the 20th anniversary of “Batman Begins,” so of course the tributes and retrospective interviews are flowing like the CAPE… ER… ER of the CAPED CRUSADER. The film’s co-writer, David S. Goyer, just took to the Happy Sad Confused Podcast to share that Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster, widely considered a classic of superhero cinema, didn’t necessarily have its greatness recognized by Warner Bros. executives upon its 2005 release.
There was one particular point of contention: the fact that Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne isn’t actually seen in the Batsuit as Batman until about an hour into the running time. Most of the film up until that point is about his pre-Batsuit life, including his martial arts training with the League of Shadows in a Himalayan Eyrie.
“They weren’t happy about it,” Goyer said on the podcast (via Variety ). “No disrespect to the actors who played Bruce Wayne before this, and as viewers, we were always twiddling our thumbs waiting for the character to get into costume and for the movie to start. But why is that?”
So to address this issue, Goyer and Nolan compared when Wayne’s debut as Batman occurs in “Batman Begins” to the first moment Clark Kent is fully in costume in Richard Donner’s “Superman: The Movie” and other superhero films and “timed the minute in the movie that the character had put on the costume… it’s not too far off that it’s not too far off that they!”
More than any big-screen Batman adaptation to that point, “Batman Begins,” and the trilogy it spawned, was intended to be a character study. So there was a real intention behind this desire to make the audience know and care about this character before he puts on the Batsuit.
“We knew very early on that we needed the audience to fall in love with Bruce Wayne,” Goyer said. “We had to have an incredible action sequence that involved Bruce Wayne and not Batman. That’s how we created this massive escape from the temple and him sliding across the ice.”
It’s fair to say that the rapturous reception audiences gave this film is what mattered in the end, not the perspective of the proceedings.
