Previous Batmen

The phenomenal box office success of The Dark Knight suggests that, thank goodness, moviegoers haven’t seen the last of Batman. While we’d love to watch the current filmmaking team stay in place a good long while, past experience suggests we won’t have many more Nolan/Bale Batman films. Before anybody starts throwing around ideas for future replacements, here’s a list of past Batmen, presented roughly from best to worst.

— Christian Bale: The best to date, partly on his own merits and partly thanks to Christopher Nolan’s highbrow take on the material. ‘Nuff said.

— Michael Keaton: A serious actor who embraced his dark side to make the most of director Tim Burton’s heavily stylized vision. In 1989’s Batman and the deliberately nastier sequel Batman Returns, the two made the world safe for an eventual flood of superhero films. It’s not their fault what happened to the cinematic Dark Knight in the Nineties.

— Adam West: While the version of Batman who briefly dominated TVs in the Sixties barely resembles the version held dear by comic book fans (for whom Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns is a holy text), let it not be said that Adam West did not fully inhabit the Pop-Art crimefighter he was hired to play. Basically a muscular Boy Scout with an arsenal of Bat-branded gizmos, this “Biff!”-”Bang!”-”Pow!” hero was laughable but struck a cultural chord.

— Val Kilmer: His time under the cowl was brief, and it’s still hard to believe that an actor known for spiky blond hair was ever cast as tall-dark-and-you-know Bruce Wayne. Then again, given the incredibly garish tone of the ironically titled Batman Forever, a blond Bats was barely odd enough to register.

— George Clooney: The film he starred in, Batman & Robin, was horrible — bad enough to kill the franchise for nearly a decade, make director Joel Schumacher persona non grata among comics fans, and earn a place in the camp canon for its too-frequent anatomical close-ups. Still, the famously suave Clooney was an obvious choice for the role of playboy Bruce Wayne, and physically he’s a better match for the role than many of the others who have played the part.

— The Cartoon Crew: Over the years, plenty of mostly anonymous actors have played Batman in cartoons. Whatever nostalgia thirtysomethings might have for the SuperFriends, though, they’d probably be reluctant to claim that the cardboard Caped Crusader who starred in any of those Saturday-morning ‘toons was worth writing home about.

— Lewis Wilson and Robert Lowery: Nobody’s saying it’s your fault, fellas — you didn’t run the studios or set the budget, as far as we know — but the string of 1940’s black-and-white serials here and here you starred in were so hokey they make Flash Gordon  look like The Matrix. Non-obsessive fans who haven’t tracked these down on DVD can see the gloriously amateurish costumes in reviews here and here, where they can easily imagine the kind of cheap cliffhanger adventures you and the Boy Wonder had.

— Honorable Mention: Jim Broadbent?! Yes, the brilliant actor known for playing frumpy, tweed-clad Englishmen recently popped up in a short British spoof as a washed-up Dark Knight lamenting his lost product endorsements and downgraded Batmobile. You can currently watch it online (in parts one and two) and compare Broadbent’s Bat-suit to those of the ’40s.

 
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