List of all the Batman movies

GOTHAM CITY THE ASTROMECH / CINEMA FILES

One symbol.
Many Gothams.

Batman movies in release order, with the actors, separate timelines, defining scenes and ideas behind each reinvention.

The cowl stays recognisable. The meaning changes with the man, the filmmaker and the city around him.

THE RELEASE FILE

Batman movies in release order

The year below is the release year. These films span several continuities, so the dates do not form one continuous account of Bruce Wayne’s life.

Before the feature films: 1943 and 1949

THE THEATRICAL SERIALS

Lewis Wilson played Batman opposite Douglas Croft’s Robin in the 15-chapter Batman serial of 1943. Robert Lowery and Johnny Duncan took over for Batman and Robin in 1949, also a 15-chapter serial. These are the character’s earliest live-action screen adventures. Their chapter format belongs to an earlier cinema-going tradition, which is why the feature-film guide begins in 1966. The 1943 production also carries explicit wartime anti-Japanese racism, a significant part of its historical context.

1966–1997 / THE FIRST FEATURE-FILM ERAS

From pop-art adventure to gothic obsession

01 / 1966 THE ADAM WEST CONTINUITY

Batman: The Movie

Heroism with a straight face

Batman and Robin face an alliance of four villains who steal a dehydrator and reduce the United World Organisation’s delegates to powder. The scale is international, the science cheerfully impossible, and the heroes treat every development with the gravity of a constitutional emergency.

The bomb is the character test

The famous bomb-disposal sequence works because Batman refuses to throw away his responsibilities along with the explosive. Everywhere he runs, another person or animal needs protecting. His elaborate courtesy traps him inside the joke, while also making his ethics unusually clear. Adam West’s Batman has room for absurdity without becoming casually cruel.

Lee Meriwether’s Catwoman, posing as journalist Kitka, also makes Bruce’s desire for romance part of the trap. Under the surface comedy sits an enduring Batman problem: the life he hopes to have remains vulnerable to the mission he already leads.

Its place in the myth: This Batman is civic-minded, sociable and comfortable with Robin at his side. The film establishes how much warmth the character can carry.

02 / 1989 BURTON / SCHUMACHER FILM CYCLE

Batman

Gotham discovers its own urban legend

Tim Burton’s Batman introduces its hero as something criminals have heard about and barely believe. Keaton makes Bruce quiet, distracted and socially elusive. Inside the armour, that uncertainty becomes concentration. The split gives the costume a purpose beyond concealment: it supplies a shape he can inhabit.

Two men trapped in the same origin story

Jack Napier falls into chemicals during Batman’s intervention at Axis Chemicals and emerges as the Joker. Bruce later recognises him as the gunman who murdered his parents. The film ties hero and villain together through reciprocal acts of creation, compressing Gotham’s wider history of crime into a fiercely personal feud.

The Joker turns cosmetics, television advertising and a parade into weapons. Batman answers with his own spectacular machinery. Their struggle is also a contest over who controls Gotham’s imagination, with Vicki Vale caught between the public spectacle and Bruce’s guarded private life.

Anton Furst’s oppressive city design and Danny Elfman’s score give the film the weight of a modern gothic fable. Our Batman 1989 production guide explores the world built around that performance.

The lasting image: The Bat-Signal makes the rumour official. Gotham ends the film with a protector whose methods remain unsettling, including his use of lethal force.

03 / 1992 BURTON / SCHUMACHER FILM CYCLE

Batman Returns

Three damaged lives beneath the Christmas lights

Burton’s second Gotham is colder, stranger and more intimate. The Penguin seeks acceptance from the city that discarded him, industrialist Max Shreck packages him as a political candidate, and Selina Kyle rebuilds herself after Shreck pushes her from a window. Bruce moves among people whose injuries have become identities.

The masquerade strips away the disguises

At Shreck’s costume party, Bruce and Selina arrive without masks. Their repeated lines about mistletoe reveal what the costumes had concealed. Both recognise somebody who understands the compulsion to live twice, yet recognition cannot reconcile their choices. Selina’s determination to punish Shreck outruns Bruce’s offer of a shared future.

The dialogue and dark humour of Batman Returns keep pulling romance towards tragedy. Penguin’s abandonment echoes Bruce’s bereavement, while Shreck shows how comfortably respectable power can accommodate predation. The man in the tailored suit can be as dangerous as the creatures beneath the streets.

Catwoman survives the finale, but the possible life Bruce glimpsed with her remains out of reach. His victory leaves the city functioning and the man inside the car profoundly alone.

What the sequel exposes: Bruce can recognise his own pain in somebody else. That recognition gives him neither ownership of her future nor the power to save her from every choice.

04 / 1995 BURTON / SCHUMACHER FILM CYCLE

Batman Forever

A new orphan enters Wayne Manor

Schumacher trades Burton’s winter nightmare for towering statues, saturated colour and restless movement. Beneath that redesign, Batman Forever gives Bruce a direct confrontation with his own beginnings: Dick Grayson loses his family during Two-Face’s attack on the circus, then brings his grief and desire for revenge into Bruce’s home.

Nygma wants the man behind the mask

Edward Nygma’s Box appears to offer an improved television experience while secretly harvesting information from users’ brains. His fascination with Bruce turns imitation into invasion. Two-Face externalises a fractured identity; Nygma tries to acquire an identity by consuming other people’s minds. Both sharpen the film’s concern with who gets to define Bruce Wayne.

Kilmer’s Bruce considers whether the mission has swallowed every other possible self. The arrival of Robin gives the question practical consequences: he must teach another grieving person how to live. That makes the film a useful companion to our exploration of Batman and Bruce Wayne’s divided identity.

The climax also complicates Bruce’s advice about revenge. Dick saves Two-Face, but Batman’s subsequent coin trick sends the villain to his death. The film’s moral argument carries a contradiction its spectacle never fully resolves.

The new responsibility: Batman becomes a mentor. Gotham’s protection now requires a relationship that Bruce cannot manage solely through secrecy and control.

05 / 1997 BURTON / SCHUMACHER FILM CYCLE

Batman & Robin

The family grows while its father figure fades

Mr. Freeze pursues a cure for his wife, Nora, while Poison Ivy manipulates him into a plan that would destroy Gotham’s human population and favour her plants. Bruce and Dick quarrel, Barbara Wilson joins them as Batgirl, and Alfred’s illness brings mortality into the house that usually shelters them from it.

Alfred supplies the film’s emotional centre

The giant ice sculptures, fluorescent gangs and avalanche of puns repeatedly swamp the stakes. Yet Alfred’s deterioration gives the story a recognisable fear: Bruce may lose another parent. Freeze’s research eventually becomes the means of helping him, allowing Batman to approach an enemy through his capacity to heal.

A useful continuity detail: Alicia Silverstone’s Barbara Wilson is Alfred’s niece in this film. She is distinct from Barbara Gordon, the comics’ best-known Batgirl. The change ties her directly to the household’s central crisis.

Schumacher’s Gotham embraces comic-book spectacle. Freeze’s grief and Alfred’s illness provide a quieter story beneath the ice.

The film struggles whenever every exchange becomes a punchline, but its endpoint is coherent: Bruce has to share the work and accept the people who choose to care about him. The final running trio turns the solitary silhouette into a family portrait.

Where this era ends: The original four-film cycle concludes with Batman learning to trust partners. The next live-action feature starts Bruce’s story again.

2005–2012 / CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

A symbol built, compromised and inherited

06 / 2005 THE DARK KNIGHT TRILOGY / 1 OF 3

Batman Begins

Fear becomes a method

Bruce Wayne’s training provides the film’s central conflict before he ever wears the cowl. The League of Shadows teaches him to weaponise fear, then asks him to accept execution and collective punishment as instruments of order. He takes the technique and rejects the organisation’s claim to decide which cities deserve to survive.

Gotham’s disease reaches beyond the street

Falcone’s criminal influence, corrupt officials and Scarecrow’s abuse of psychiatric authority make the city’s failures institutional. The street-level perspective associated with Batman: Year One is present in Bruce and Gordon’s attempt to work around systems that protect the people exploiting them.

The themes of Batman Begins converge when Ra’s al Ghul plans to turn fear toxin into mass panic. Bruce must prove Gotham deserves the chance his former teacher would deny it. Yet leaving Ra’s aboard the doomed train troubles the clean distinction Bruce draws between killing and allowing death.

Rachel recognises that his public playboy performance hides a deeper commitment to Batman. Meanwhile, Gordon’s Joker card suggests that the symbol has entered a city capable of answering it with new forms of theatrical violence.

The origin’s unresolved question: Bruce has made himself useful to Gotham. He has also created an identity powerful enough to organise the rest of his life around it.

07 / 2008 THE DARK KNIGHT TRILOGY / 2 OF 3

The Dark Knight

Gotham’s moral rules become the crime scene

Bruce hopes Harvey Dent can accomplish openly what Batman does outside the law. The Joker attacks that hope by constructing situations in which protection, truth and personal loyalty become incompatible. Rachel’s death and Dent’s disfigurement turn the city’s prospective legitimate hero into an instrument of revenge.

The ferries answer the Joker; the ending answers Bruce

The two boatloads of passengers refuse to carry out the mutual destruction the Joker expects. Ordinary people preserve a moral boundary while Gotham’s exceptional men compromise theirs. Batman’s citywide sonar system may help find the Joker, but Lucius Fox recognises the danger in allowing a private individual that reach.

The ethical pressure in The Dark Knight survives its action climax. Bruce and Gordon decide to conceal Dent’s murders and transfer the blame to Batman, preserving a public symbol through a lie. Their immediate solution becomes an obligation the sequel will collect.

Our guide to the graphic-novel influences behind The Dark Knight helps trace its crime-story foundations. The film’s decisive move is to make Batman’s sacrifice politically consequential: he can choose disgrace, but the public cannot consent to a truth it never receives.

The price of the ending: Batman becomes a fugitive, Dent becomes an official hero, and Gotham’s recovery rests on a concealed failure.

08 / 2012 THE DARK KNIGHT TRILOGY / 3 OF 3

The Dark Knight Rises

Bruce must learn to want a future

Eight years after Dent’s death, Bruce is physically diminished and withdrawn. Bane defeats him, exposes the Dent cover-up and takes control of Gotham. A city that appeared to have solved its criminal crisis discovers how much of its confidence depended on an official fiction.

The prison makes fear necessary again

Bruce’s escape from the pit reverses a lesson he once thought he had mastered. His willingness to die has become a weakness. Climbing without the rope forces him to value survival, converting fear into the will to live. The scene gives the film’s physical recovery a psychological purpose.

Bane’s revolution also conceals Talia’s intention to destroy Gotham through the converted fusion reactor. The rhetoric of returning power to citizens provides cover for a judgement already passed on them, echoing the League’s position in Batman Begins.

The sacrifice and legacy themes of The Dark Knight Rises culminate in Bruce’s apparent death, his survival with Selina, and Blake’s discovery of the Batcave. Alfred finally sees evidence that the child he raised can have a life beyond the promise he made to the dead.

The trilogy’s destination: Gotham keeps Batman as a symbol while Bruce is allowed to leave. The ending separates the city’s need for hope from one man’s obligation to suffer forever.

2016–2021 / BEN AFFLECK’S BATMAN

A fallen protector tries to rebuild his faith

09 / 2016 THE DC EXTENDED UNIVERSE

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

The guardian becomes the threat he fears

This Bruce has spent years fighting crime before the story begins. The destruction of Metropolis during Superman’s battle with Zod gives his accumulated losses a new target. He interprets immense power as an inevitable threat and uses that assumption to justify a pre-emptive killing.

The Robin suit is a wound the film leaves unnamed

A defaced Robin costume in the Batcave suggests the loss of a partner. The film does not identify that Robin by name on screen. The image matters because it makes Bruce’s deterioration legible without supplying a complete history: somebody once stood beside him, and he now keeps the failure on display.

The armoured confrontation draws heavily on the visual language of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Its dramatic purpose here is to expose Bruce’s dehumanisation of Superman. The reference to Martha interrupts the execution by confronting him with a threatened mother and a son trying to save her.

Our Batman v Superman analysis follows the wider collision of fear, manipulation and power. Superman’s sacrifice against Doomsday leaves Bruce with guilt and a new obligation to seek allies. The Ultimate Edition adds material clarifying the conspiracy around Superman; it is an expanded cut of this film.

The turn towards recovery: Bruce’s next mission grows out of the recognition that his certainty helped bring the world close to catastrophe.

10 / 2016 DCEU / GUEST APPEARANCE

Suicide Squad

Batman seen from the other side of an arrest

Batman enters through the histories of the people Amanda Waller intends to weaponise. He confronts Deadshot while Floyd Lawton is with his daughter and pursues Joker and Harley Quinn before rescuing Harley from the submerged car. These brief appearances place Gotham’s familiar protector inside the villains’ account of how they reached captivity.

Waller knows which secrets have a price

The mid-credits conversation between Waller and Bruce supplies the more important connective tissue. Bruce obtains files on metahumans, while Waller makes clear that she knows about his nocturnal activities. Their encounter places two competing methods of assembling extraordinary people beside each other: Bruce’s search for allies and Waller’s coercive control.

The film belongs in a guide to Batman’s live-action appearances, with its limited role clearly marked. His scenes add context to Affleck’s Gotham and to Bruce’s search for other heroes, while the central story belongs to Task Force X.

Why include it: The appearances connect Batman’s local crimefighting to a world where the government is turning captured supervillains into expendable assets.

11 / 2017 DCEU / THEATRICAL VERSION

Justice League

The solitary strategist recruits a team

After Superman’s death, Bruce works with Diana to gather the heroes needed to resist Steppenwolf and the Mother Boxes. His role changes from judging another hero’s power to building a group capable of using different powers together. Equipment, money and planning remain useful, but he must persuade people whose abilities exceed his own.

Leadership requires a kind of surrender

The decision to resurrect Superman exposes the limits of Bruce’s judgement. Returning Clark to life initially creates another crisis, and Bruce’s confidence depends on a gamble involving Lois. When the team finally operates together, Batman’s contribution is shaped by his human vulnerability rather than erased by it.

The theatrical release’s lighter exchanges and compressed character stories produce a markedly different experience from Zack Snyder’s later version of Justice League. The production distinction matters when discussing Affleck’s characterisation, particularly the shift from the brutality of Batman v Superman to a more openly cooperative figure.

This version’s endpoint: Bruce accepts that protecting the world requires people he cannot control. The formation of the League gives his remorse a constructive direction.

12 / 2021 DCEU / ALTERNATE VERSION OF JUSTICE LEAGUE

Zack Snyder’s Justice League

A longer reckoning with loss and responsibility

The four-hour version restores a different structure to the League’s formation, with a much larger role for Victor Stone’s bereavement, alienation and power. Bruce’s attempt to bring the team together sits among several stories about people whose lives have been broken by forces they struggle to understand.

Batman’s faith meets the limits of preparation

The climax makes the group’s dependence on one another explicit. Barry’s intervention in time and Victor’s confrontation with the Mother Boxes carry responsibilities that Bruce could never fulfil through better armour or a more elaborate plan. Batman’s importance lies partly in helping create the conditions for those people to act.

Darkseid, the Anti-Life Equation and the closing Knightmare material extend the film’s horizon beyond Steppenwolf. They also leave Bruce caught between renewed faith and visions of another collapse. Those scenes establish prospective conflicts; they do not turn the released film into a completed account of that future.

For viewing purposes, place this after Batman v Superman. Seeing the 2017 film first can make the changes illuminating, but the story does not require it.

The continuity rule: This is an alternative telling of Justice League, not a sequel to the 2017 theatrical cut.

2022–2023 / REINVENTION AND RETURN

The detective, the mentor and the multiverse

13 / 2022 MATT REEVES’ SEPARATE CONTINUITY

The Batman

Vengeance discovers the people it has overlooked

The Batman joins Bruce in his second year of crimefighting. A series of murders leads him through Gotham’s political establishment, its criminal economy and the corrupted promise of the Wayne Renewal fund. The detective story steadily erodes his assumption that he understands the city he patrols.

The missed clue is also a class blind spot

Bruce fails to recognise the carpet tool connected to the Riddler’s final preparations until a police officer explains it. His education, wealth and obsessive training have left gaps in his knowledge of ordinary work. Selina and Edward Nashton likewise force him to confront forms of vulnerability his inheritance insulated him from, even after his parents’ deaths.

The psychology of Paul Dano’s Riddler makes the villain a particularly dangerous reflection. Edward interprets Batman’s violence as encouragement and imagines a partnership that Bruce never intended. Hearing one of the attackers repeat his vengeance identity forces Batman to examine what his symbol has communicated.

The red flare in the flooded arena supplies the answer through an action. Bruce becomes visible, reaches for a frightened child and leads people to safety. The closing rescue work gives the cowl a public meaning that intimidation alone could never provide.

Explore the film’s visual and production choices in our The Batman facts and trivia guide. Its worldwide box office was approximately US$772.5 million.

The change that matters: Bruce starts to understand protection as care. Staying in Gotham becomes a commitment to the people who must live through the aftermath.

14 / 2023 DCEU / MULTIVERSE CROSSOVER

The Flash

Different Batmen confront the same temptation

Barry’s attempt to prevent his mother’s death changes the world around him. Affleck’s Bruce warns him about trying to repair the past, while the altered timeline brings him to an older Batman played by Keaton. The returning cowl, Batcave and music carry the memory of Burton’s films into a story about how memory can become a trap.

A familiar face does not make a simple sequel

Keaton’s Batman helps the two Barrys rescue Kara and confront Zod. Barry then discovers that repeated interventions do not give him unlimited control over the outcome. Batman’s mortality becomes part of the lesson: a hero’s willingness to fight cannot guarantee that every loss can be reversed.

The grief and time-travel themes of The Flash connect its Batmen more securely than a tidy universal timeline could. Each version of Bruce has had to make a life after catastrophe; Barry tries to remove the catastrophe itself.

The final George Clooney appearance shows that Barry has again arrived in a changed reality. Clooney appears as Bruce Wayne, without a costumed Batman scene. Our guide to The Flash’s superhero cameos covers the wider collection of returning and alternate screen figures.

How to place it: Follow the DCEU story into The Flash, then treat its other Batmen as encounters across altered realities. Their presence does not fuse every earlier film into one chronology.

THE ANIMATION FILES

The Batman films a live-action list leaves out

Animation has carried some of Batman’s sharpest stories about grief, revenge and responsibility. These six starting points are selected essentials, rather than a complete animated filmography. Several belong to separate continuities.

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

DIRECTORS: ERIC RADOMSKI AND BRUCE TIMM / BATMAN: KEVIN CONROY / THEATRICAL FEATURE

A masked killer and the return of Andrea Beaumont pull Bruce into the life he almost chose before Batman. His plea at his parents’ grave makes the origin painfully specific: happiness feels like a betrayal of the promise he made in grief. Andrea’s pursuit of revenge then exposes a path he might have followed. The film belongs to the world of Batman: The Animated Series and makes a compelling case for judging animated Batman alongside the live-action interpretations.

Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero (1998)

DIRECTOR: BOYD KIRKLAND / BATMAN: KEVIN CONROY / DC ANIMATED UNIVERSE

Freeze’s attempt to save Nora brings Barbara Gordon into danger as a potential organ donor. The premise takes a motive that can invite sympathy and pushes it to the point where another person becomes disposable. Paired with Batman & Robin, it provides an instructive comparison: the same villain’s grief can support broad spectacle or a tightly focused moral crisis.

Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker (2000)

DIRECTOR: CURT GEDA / BATMAN: WILL FRIEDLE / BRUCE WAYNE: KEVIN CONROY

Terry McGinnis inherits a Batman history that Bruce has not fully disclosed. The Joker’s apparent return leads back to the abuse of Tim Drake, exposing a devastating cost of recruiting children into the mission. Terry’s eventual response also depends on his own personality. The successor can carry Batman’s responsibilities while finding a way to fight that his mentor would never have chosen.

Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010)

DIRECTOR: BRANDON VIETTI / BATMAN: BRUCE GREENWOOD / STANDALONE ANIMATED STORY

Jason Todd’s return forces Bruce to face the former Robin he failed to save. Jason’s central grievance concerns the continued survival of the Joker who murdered him. The confrontation makes Batman’s refusal to kill intimate and costly: his rule has consequences for somebody he loved. The film gives the moral code a sustained challenge instead of treating its existence as a sufficient answer.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Parts 1 and 2 (2012–2013)

DIRECTOR: JAY OLIVA / BATMAN: PETER WELLER / TWO-PART ADAPTATION

An older Bruce returns to action in a Gotham of escalating violence, hostile commentary and collapsing public confidence. These two films adapt Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, carrying its ageing vigilante, political satire and Superman confrontation into animation. Watch them as their own two-part story. Their shared imagery with Batman v Superman reflects a common comic-book source.

The LEGO Batman Movie (2017)

DIRECTOR: CHRIS McKAY / BATMAN: WILL ARNETT / THEATRICAL FEATURE

A Batman who insists he needs nobody goes home to an enormous, empty house. The comedy makes that loneliness impossible to romanticise. Robin, Barbara Gordon, Alfred and even the Joker force him to confront his dependence on relationships. Its references embrace almost every flavour of screen Batman, while its emotional argument remains direct: a man who has organised his life around preventing loss has made himself afraid to belong. Arnett also voices Batman in The LEGO Movie (2014) and The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part (2019).

READING THE SYMBOL

What changes when Batman changes?

CONTINUITY QUESTIONS

The distinctions that save a rewatch

KEEP EXPLORING GOTHAM

Beyond the cowl

Follow the detective tradition into Batman: Year One and The Long Halloween, explore the working titles hidden behind the Batman productions, or revisit the dialogue that has defined Batman on film.

The full DC Comics archive connects those stories to Superman, the Justice League, the multiverse and the villains who keep testing what heroism costs.

Film credits and continuity references: DC’s live-action viewing guide, DC’s film catalogue and the individual films. Animated film references: DC’s animation guide. Box-office figure: The Numbers. The scene readings and thematic comparisons are critical interpretation.