It’s the 20th anniversary of “Batman Begins,” so of course the tributes and retrospective interviews are flowing like the Caped Crusader’s… er… cape. The film‘s co-writer David S. Goyer just took to the Happy Sad Confused podcast to share that the Christopher Nolan blockbuster, widely considered a top-tier classic of superhero cinema, did not necessarily have its greatness recognized by the Warner Bros. execs in the leadup to its 2005 release.
There was one sticking point in particular: The fact that Christian Bale‘s Bruce Wayne is not actually seen in the Batsuit as Batman until about an hour into its running time. Most of the film to that point is about his pre-Batman life, including his training in martial arts with the League of Shadows in a Himalayan eyrie.
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“They were not happy about that,” Goyer said on the podcast (via Variety). “No disrespect to the actors who played Bruce Wayne prior to this, and as moviegoers we were always twiddling our thumbs waiting for the character to get into costume and for the movie to begin. But why is that?”
So to address this issue, Goyer and Nolan compared when Wayne’s debut as Batman occurs in “Batman Begins” with the first moment Clark Kent is fully in costume in Richard Donner’s “Superman: The Movie” and other superhero movies and “clocked the minute into the film the character had put on the costume… We weren’t that much farther than them!”
More than any Batman big-screen adaptation to that point, though, “Batman Begins,” and the trilogy it spawned, was intended to be a character study. So there was real intent behind that desire to get audiences to know and care about this character before he puts on the Batsuit.
“We knew fairly early on that we needed to have the audience fall in love with Bruce Wayne,” Goyer said. “We had to have an amazing action sequence that involved Bruce Wayne and not Batman. That’s how we came up with that massive escape from the temple and him sliding down the ice.”
Fair to say the rapturous reception audiences gave this film is what ultimately mattered in the end, not the perspective of the suits.
