The Batman Movie Inspirations & DC Comics Influences

The Batman presents a vision of the Caped Crusader and Gotham City influenced by a variety of movie and comic book inspirations. After three decades of steadily released Batman movies and multiple versions of characters like Catwoman and Jim Gordon, The Batman has assembled a unique combination of influences to create a new cinematic vision of the Dark Knight. While The Batman is a unique interpretation of the character for the big screen, exploring its influences can increase the appreciation of what it accomplishes.

At nearly three hours, The Batman allows for its title hero to engage in a procedural investigation like never before seen in any of his theatrical incarnations. As the first movie in its continuity, The Batman is unburdened by the usual sequel-teasing and callbacks to earlier movies. Instead, it is able to make subtle references to both non-superhero movies and its comic book influences alike.

In addition to the movie borrowing stories from a few Batman comics that focus on the Caped Crusader’s early years, The Batman has landed on a new source of inspiration from non-superhero movies to show the World’s Greatest Detective at work. Although political corruption is a hallmark of Batman stories going back decades, Matt Reeves’s depiction of Gotham’s amoral leaders owes a lot to the neo-noir movies of the 1970s. This is the perfect setting for Batman’s detective work and a great way to portray the many twists and turns Batman’s investigation takes as he pursues the Riddler.

Iconic movies of the seventies like Chinatown showed a distrust of authority, and the detectives and private investigators of the era often uncovered disturbing truths about corruption during their investigations. Robert Pattinson’s narration, which appears prominently at the beginning and the end of The Batman, owes much to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, a movie that had an even greater influence on Todd Haynes’s Joker. More recent film influences include director David Fincher’s Seven and Zodiac. The Riddler’s theatrical killings mirror the pointed killings by John Doe in Seven. Indeed, Paul Dano’s Riddler not only visually resembles the Zodiac Killer, but leaves similar ciphers as clues following his killings. This helps to give the crime world of The Batman a more grounded feeling of menace and dread and certainly distances the movie from lighter interpretations of the source material.

As he reveals in early narration, Robert Pattinson’s Batman is relatively new to fighting crime. Several prominent Batman comic book arcs focus on this time, including Batman: Year One and The Long Halloween. Year One focuses on the infancy of the Dark Knight’s career. Choosing to emulate this comic helps ground the character in the world of its cinematic influences, and allows for Robert Pattinson’s Batman to prove his strength to audiences for his first outing as the character. The Long Halloween focuses on Batman’s hunt for a serial killer not unlike his urgent search for the Riddler as more of Gotham’s leaders come under his threat in The Batman. Additionally, Batman: Ego and Other Tales influenced the portrayal of Batman’s psychology in the movie.

This variety of influences has made The Batman an astounding success. In an era when manicured cinematic universes dominate the box office, Matt Reeves’ interpretation of the character and his rogues gallery have given new life to a genre that can continue to grow by assembling more influences. The Batman shows the strengths of DC’s approach to greenlighting movies with strong directorial voices, and gives hope for the quality of future interpretations of iconic characters.