Batman is one of the most iconic characters in fiction, a superhero vigilante who protects the citizens of Gotham City from the Rogues Gallery of villains like the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin, Bane and more.
He’s also one of the most adapted characters in film history, with numerous film and television projects focusing on the Caped Crusader.
Saturday is Batman’s 85th birthday, so what better way to celebrate the beloved character than rank all 12 of his movies?
We’ve tallied all 12 of the main theatrical projects that featured Batman as its central character, leaving behind films where Batman appeared but didn’t headline the cast, like Justice League and The Flash.
Starting with Adam West and going through recent Batman projects from Christian Bale and Robert Pattinson, let’s go through the Batman films through 2022’s The Batman.
Light the birthday candles and the Bat-Signal, and let’s get to work.
12. Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice
Zack Snyder more than redeemed himself with his thrilling director’s cut of Justice League, but Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice remains one of the more unfortunate misfires of the 2010s.
It’s a slog of an experience that simultaneously misinterprets Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and tries far too hard to force Batman and Superman into the same narrative. Snyder was better than this, and he figured out a much better way to let these characters coexist on his next DC project.
11. Batman & Robin
The disasterpiece that nearly killed the superhero movie before it even got off the ground, Batman & Robin is one of the most reviled studio projects ever. In retrospect, it’s a very campy piece of corporate branding that exists to sell toys and create memes for a social internet that didn’t really exist yet.
However, it’s also junky fun, a half-warm Burger King Whopper that tastes like a road trip in middle school but still gives you a stomach ache. It’s got some inspired bits, starting with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s infamous cheese from playing Mr. Freeze and extending to its delirious plot and hammy visual effects. It’s also got a stellar Alfred performance from the late, great Michael Gough. It’s hard to hate a movie that’s so fun, even if it’s quite flawed. This one is a relic of its time, one that we miss more than we realize we do.
10. Batman: The Movie
Adam West’s supremely silly 1960s Batman got a movie where he fights a shark. It did exactly what it set out to do, which is harness the camp of its television run and give it the cinema shine. It’s a pure lark.
Holy Oceanic Repellent Batspray, Batman!
9. The Lego Batman Movie
A very fun skewering of the tropes that hold up the cowl, The Lego Batman Movie is one of the great satires on superhero storytelling while also showing the kind of love that makes a satire like this possible. It might not top The Lego Movie, but it doesn’t need to. It’s just a very funny sendup that also packs in a surprising amount of heart.
8. Batman Forever
Batman Forever, as the kids say, is a pure vibes movie. From the iconic soundtrack to Jim Carrey’s beautifully hammy performance as The Riddler, Joel Schumacher’s first foray into Gotham City is genuinely a fantastic piece of pop art. It’s such a giant swing with such a legacy character that it’s genuinely more and more impressive that Warner Bros. let this one happen as we get further removed from it. Val Kilmer might not be the most beloved Batman, but the movie around him is just too irresistible to ignore.
7. The Batman
Matt Reeves launched Batman into a Jeph Loeb/Long Halloween universe aesthetically propped up by David Fincher’s Se7en and Nirvana needle drops. It’s easily the most Batman of any of these movies, giving the Caped Crusader a bulk of the screen time and fading its handful of villains into the tapestry of Gotham’s underbelly. It’s a bold, brash take on Batman, thrilling in its execution and impressive in its assembly. We’re definitely in for more.
6. Batman Begins
Christopher Nolan’s first Batman film is the definitive origin story for Bruce Wayne, weaving the rise of Gotham’s Dark Knight against themes of heroism, sacrifice and morality in the face of black-and-white retribution. Christian Bale earned his place in the Batsuit here, and Cillian Murphy delivered a very memorable bad guy in the fear toxin-spewing Scarecrow.
5. The Dark Knight Rises
Nolan’s grand finale in his Dark Knight trilogy is the most underrated film on this list, complete with the mind-blowing spectacle that marked the filmmaker’s time in the series with a fascinating narrative tie-up of the themes and characters in Nolan’s Bat-universe. Tom Hardy’s masked menace Bane is one of the best villains in any Batman movie, and that opening sequence where one plane literally rips apart another one mid-air is an all-timer.
4. Batman
It’s hard to believe now that Tim Burton’s Batman basically changed the way Hollywood looked at superheroes, but this is the film that changed the entire tenor of the industry for decades to come. It’s also pretty great, mixing in Michael Keaton’s suave take on Bruce Wayne/Batman with Jack Nicholson’s spectacular snarl of a Joker.
Set to Danny Elfman’s triumphant score, Burton’s first Batman movie will live eternal in how it irreversibly changed movies and turned Keaton into a movie star overnight. It’s still one of the best we’ve ever gotten.
3. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
The lone theatrical Batman film of the 1990s, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is a stone-cold stunner. The best of what we got from Batman: The Animated Series, this surprisingly dour neo-noir dived into the personal dilemmas Wayne goes through to wear the cape and cowl while unleashing a Batman story for the ages.
This one really didn’t have to go this hard, but we’re eternally grateful that it did. It set an impossibly high bar for any animated sequels (or Batman movies in general) to clear.
2. Batman Returns
Burton’s second Batman film is one of the filmmaker’s best films period, a delightfully dark Christmas film that lets Keaton’s Batman linger in the background as Danny DeVito’s gleefully grotesque Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer’s firecracker of a Catwoman infiltrate the Gotham patriarchy and each exact various levels of revenge on the society that deemed them outcasts.
It’s everything you’d want a Burton Batman movie to be, complete with some incredible set designs and yet another banger of a score from Elfman. Until The Dark Knight, it was easily the best Batman film we had.
1. The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight is one of the greatest films of all time. It’s one of the definitive post-9/11 films and the bleak blockbuster that changed the Academy Awards and how studios approach darker takes of intellectual property.
Nolan’s masterpiece features some of the most memorable moments of the 2000s for any movie and a gripping morality tale of chaos and justice in a society shaken by random acts of villainy from the late, great Heath Ledger’s all-time take on the Joker.
You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain, this film argues, as it does that sometime we get the hero we need over the one we actually deserve. It’s the definitive take on Batman as much as it is one of the definitive works of cinema.
