BATMAN BEGINS
- Era
- BATMAN
- Genres
- Crime
- Released
- 2005-06-15
- Runtime
- 2h 20m
SIGNAL SUMMARY
- Released
- 2005-06-15
- Runtime
- 2h 20m
- Budget
- $150M
- Worldwide gross
- $376M
- IMDb
- 8.2 (1.7M votes)
- RT critics
- 85%
- Metacritic
- 70
- Oscars
- 0 wins / 1 noms
REBOOT PROTOCOL
The Batman franchise had been dead for eight years when Nolan took it over. Batman Begins was a $150M wager that the character could be rebuilt from first principles — fear, apprenticeship, a city shot like a crime scene instead of a comic panel. The wager cleared: $376M worldwide, an 85% critics' approval, and a template every franchise reset since has tried to copy.
FORMAT: Anamorphic 35mm; rebuilt the comic-book film as crime epic. The IMAX experiments this trilogy is famous for had not begun yet — that story starts with The Dark Knight.
FIRST ECHO
By trilogy standards, $376M looks modest — but it is the starting point of the biggest franchise Nolan ever made. By the trilogy's close, worldwide grosses had climbed to 2.9× this film's. Neither sequel gets made if this one misses.
PERSONNEL CONTINUITY
Nolan hired this cast and crew for the long haul. Checking this roster against the two later films, 7 of the 13 principals listed here stayed on for the entire 2005–2012 trilogy — the camera and the edit never changed hands, and Hans Zimmer scored all three.
| Operative | Unit | 2005 | 2008 | 2012 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Christian Bale | CAST | ● | ● | ● |
| Michael Caine | CAST | ● | ● | ● |
| Liam Neeson | CAST | ● | · | · |
| Katie Holmes | CAST | ● | · | · |
| Gary Oldman | CAST | ● | ● | ● |
| Cillian Murphy | CAST | ● | · | · |
| Tom Wilkinson | CAST | ● | · | · |
| Rutger Hauer | CAST | ● | · | · |
| Ken Watanabe | CAST | ● | · | · |
| Morgan Freeman | CAST | ● | ● | ● |
| Hans Zimmer | SCORE | ● | ● | ● |
| Wally Pfister | CAMERA | ● | ● | ● |
| Lee Smith | EDIT | ● | ● | ● |