From right: Val Kilmer, Michael Keaton and Christian Bale as Batman, Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman and Danny DeVito as the Penquin in Batman Returns
From right: Val Kilmer, Michael Keaton and Christian Bale as Batman, Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman and Danny DeVito as the Penquin in Batman Returns (Images courtesy of Warner Bros.)

Since 1989, Hollywood has pumped out nine big budget Batman films. Beside those blockbuster theatrical releases, there have also been dozens of direct-to-video animated flicks, several TV series and—shudder—the handful of woebegone movies involving poor “Batfleck.” All told, we haven’t gone longer than two years at a time without a Batman movie being released into the world in some from. That trend continues next week when Matt Reeves’s highly anticipated reboot The Batman hits theaters after a COVID delay of nearly a year.

The new film is starting over from scratch, with a whole new cast in a whole new Gotham City with a whole new continuity, and as such, it’s certainly not necessary to revisit any previous iterations of the Caped Crusader to prepare for the new one. Set during Bruce Wayne’s second year of crime fighting, The Batman isn’t so much a retread of the character’s familiar origin story—parents shot in an alley, pearls everywhere, trauma, billions spent on inflicting vigilante justice on the city’s poor and mentally ill—as it is a crime noir take on the world’s greatest detective.

Judging from the film’s trailer, it seems like Reeves is trying to thread the needle between Christopher Nolan’s grimmer, more grounded films and the unabashed fun of gimmicky villains like Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz) and The Riddler (Paul Dano). Early buzz seems to suggest he may have pulled it off. But before The Batman premieres, I thought I’d take a look back at all 10 theatrically released Batman movies to see how their different interpretations compare.

A note on methodology: I tried to take into consideration the success and critical reception of these movies as well as the cultural context in which they were released. Ultimately, though, a lot of this list just came down to what I like best! Also, I do not acknowledge the films featuring “Batfleck” as Batman movies. They are DC Extended Universe movies and I do not care about them. Don’t @ me.

10. Batman Forever (1995)

Ok, so we’re starting with what may be a controversial choice. Most people with brains and eyeballs will likely argue that Batman & Robin belongs at the bottom of any list of Batman films. But I disagree. Joel Schumacher’s 1995 entry into the franchise is, to my mind, interminable. Following Tim Burton’s departure from film series, Warner Bros. hired Schumacher to course correct from what they viewed as Burton’s alienatingly weird vision in Batman Returns. They wanted a more colorful, lighter, goofier Batman that wouldn’t have kids fleeing from theaters in tears. They wanted a movie that could sell toys and Happy Meals. And so Schumacher enlisted Jim Carrey to prance around doing his Ace Ventura/The Mask shtick as The Riddler alongside Tommy Lee Jones’s broadly wacky Two-Face. He also brought in Chris O’Donnell as Robin to add some youthful badassery. The result is a neon-drenched Gotham City that has far more in common with the 1960s TV show than the darker version of the character that had been popularized in the comic books since the mid ’80s, or even the surprisingly sophisticated Batman: The Animated Series. And yet, Batman Forever still feels like it’s trying—and failing—to be a real movie. Schumacher hasn’t committed fully to camp yet, and so Batman Forever feels like a frenetic, agonizing mess.

9. Batman (1966)

One thing I learned from watching 10 Batman films in a matter of days is that, though I’m a fan of these characters and enjoy seeing them portrayed respectfully, I don’t necessarily need a Batman movie to take itself so relentlessly seriously. I am perfectly happy to see a film highlight the ridiculousness of these weirdos running around in tights and “fighting” “crime.” The 1966 Batman film, based on the versions of the characters from the ’60s TV series, finds Batman (Adam West) and Robin (Burt Ward), both fully deputized agents of the police running around in broad daylight, fighting against the diabolical confederation of Catwoman (Lee Meriwether), the Penguin (Burgess Meredith), the Joker (Cesar Romero) and the Riddler (Frank Gorsin), who are trying to dehydrate the members of a United Nations stand-in and take over the world. This is essentially the urtext when it comes to Bat-camp. Perhaps you’ve heard of shark repellent? This is where that comes from! The jokes are pretty clever and the baroque deduction West and Ward do to decipher the Riddler’s clues is particularly amusing.

And yet, this low budget ’60s Southern California sitcom version of Batman just feels a little flat to me. Maybe I’m just too much a product of a generation that expects superhero films to be big, operatic assaults on the senses to properly appreciate this pleasantly cheesy relic. Also, wow, Adam West was handsome under that goofy costume!

8. Batman & Robin (1997)

Ok, here’s my argument for why Batman & Robin isn’t at the bottom of this list: Uma Thurman. Another thing I learned from watching all of these films is that I’m so much more likely to enjoy a Batman movie when it features a living, breathing female character played by a talented actress, and Uma Thurman playing Poison Ivy as a Mae West-esque vamp is priceless! With his second entry in the Batman series, Joel Schumacher just went full camp—nipples on the batsuits, shots of multiple bat-butts—and while everyone else seems to be either struggling to overcome the idiotic material or just not even trying, Thurman totally understands the assignment. To be clear, Batman & Robin is terrible. It’s a toy commercial masquerading as a movie. But crucially, unlike Batman Forever, it seems to know that. It is a movie for children and it’s not trying to be anything more. And I would choose to watch Thurman’s Poison Ivy over Jim Carrey Jim-Carrying all over the place any day.

7. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

Yes, I’m including cartoons in this list! Based on the versions of the characters from the acclaimed animated series, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm was originally planned as a direct-to-video release, but was so impressive Warner Bros. decided to give it a theatrical release. Phantasm is a tight, hour-plus mystery that finds Bruce Wayne investigating a series of gangland murders while rekindling a lost love. Like the animated series, the film is stylish, with a ton of early 20th century noir influence in its production design. It’s also surprisingly sophisticated for a film ostensibly aimed at kids.

6. Batman Begins (2005)

The defining feature of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies is that they are superhero movies that don’t want to be superhero movies. After Batman & Robin and the success of movies like 2000’s X-Men, which attempted to portray superheroes in something approaching a more grounded, plausible reality, Warner Bros. tapped Nolan to revive Batman, starting over from the beginning. Batman Begins retells the hero’s origin story, and follows him on his quest to understand the criminal mind before returning to Gotham City to establish his nocturnal alter ego. The film was a hit with fans who had been waiting for someone to take Batman seriously, and with many critics who had written the franchise off. To its credit, Batman Begins does engage with the underlying systemic conditions that lead to crime, but its post-9/11 jihadist themes feel underdeveloped and in hindsight are not really in the best of taste. And as a Batman film, it suffers a bit from the lack of more recognizable villains—Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow is fun but kind of underused, and Ra’s al Ghul doesn’t exactly have the same impact for the general public that he does for comic book fans.

5. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

If Batman Begins’s ersatz politics haven’t aged well, this film’s have basically putrefied. For some reason, Nolan and brother Jonathan, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay, decided to infuse the final film of his Dark Knight trilogy with some vague, underdeveloped Occupy Wall Street sentiments via Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle. Also, this movie really loves cops. A literal army of lionized cops arrives in the final act to save the day for all the rich Gothamites who have been turned out of their mansions by pseudo revolutionaries. Still, if you can get past that and avoid thinking too much about some of the plot “twists” or the mechanics of Bane (Tom Hardy) and co.’s plan, The Dark Knight Rises is an exciting, rewarding, epic conclusion to the Nolan era, with not one, but two dynamic female characters!

4. Batman Returns (1992)

Talk about a dark twisted fantasy! Tim Burton just went nuts with his sequel to 1989’s Batman. With its grotesquerie and intensely goth look, Batman Returns is far more a Tim Burton film than a superhero movie. And yet, Burton understands that what we want from Batman and his rogues gallery is a certain cartoonish strangeness. So, he turned the Penguin (Danny Devito) from a dapper little gangster into a sewer-dwelling circus freak, and Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer, in an all-time iconic performance) from a jewel thief to a traumatized woman whose split personality is coming apart at the seams. This version of Gotham is certainly an acquired taste: comic book fans may quibble with certain characterizations and origin stories; parents will definitely object to some of the extreme images. But there’s no question that Batman Returns represents a distinctive, fully realized and quite striking cinematic vision. It’s also a hell of a lot of fun, and is probably one of the all-time greatest Christmas movies ever made to boot!

3. Batman (1989)

Batman Returns tends to eclipse Burton’s first Batman film in my mind. But upon revisiting it for the first time in decades for this list, I was thrilled to find that 1989’s Batman is just as delightful as its sequel. Jack Nicholson seems to be having the time of his life as the Joker. Equal parts menacing and hilarious, he spends the movie mugging cartoonishly for the camera in ways that later, more serious portrayals eschew, but which are fundamental to the character. And unlike Nolan, Burton establishes his Gotham City as a world of its own, a city with a distinct and unsettling character, dark and crowded and unlike any actual place; the perfect habitat for the weirdos who populate Batman’s world.

Batman Returns remains a personal favorite, but Batman deserves to be recognized for the way it manages to straddle the line between Burton’s darkly quirky vision and a more palatable, kid-friendly action-adventure sensibility.

2. The Dark Knight (2008)

The second of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies is widely considered to be the greatest superhero film ever made as well as one of the best films of the 2010s. Indeed, The Dark Knight succeeds both as a superhero movie and as a film more broadly. Once again, Nolan is attempting to inject the film with relevant contemporary themes like police corruption, a city in crisis, escalating crime and violence, the ways in which systems fail and the murky ethics of vigilante justice. And this time he’s largely successful. Meanwhile, where Batman Begins lacked the essential kooky fun of the character’s more recognizable enemies, The Dark Knight features an Oscar winning performance by the late Heath Ledger as the Joker. Almost unrecognizable beneath layers of prosthetic scars and smeared make-up, Ledger is at once amusing and bone chillingly scary in the role. It’s a truly captivating performance that lives up to the hype.

1. The Lego Batman Movie (2017)

So, if The Dark Knight is the greatest superhero movie ever made, why isn’t it No. 1 on this list? Simple: because The Lego Batman Movie exists. Obviously, with so many different interpretations of the character, it’s a truly weird task to compare all of them and evaluate them against each other. The 1966 Batman and The Dark Knight aren’t even the same genre of film! And so, at a certain point, when ranking these 10 movies, I just had to go with my gut reaction, and as much as I accept that The Dark Knight is a towering masterpiece and as much as I personally love Batman Returns, I have to admit that out of all the Batman movies I watched, I had the best time watching The Lego Batman Movie.

This should not be the case! I should be seething with resentment of the craven product placement and the shameless IP integration—the Gremlins, Voldemort, King Kong, Sauron from The Lord of the Rings and I think the Kraken all play significant roles in this Batman movie! Except that The Lego Batman Movie is delightful. Why is everyone a Lego person? I don’t know! It’s ridiculous and clever and it understands the fundamental absurdity of Batman and the more serious takes on the character. Meanwhile, it actually even sneaks in a subtle critique of the character’s more problematic elements when Rosario Dawson’s Police Commissioner Barbara Gordon suggests that the hero should abide by “actual Laws, proper ethics, accountability” instead of just “karate chopping poor people.” I died!

The voice cast is tremendous—Will Arnett as Batman, Michael Cera as Robin, Zach Galifianakis as the Joker, Jenny Slate as Harley Quinn…I could go on and on and on—the jokes are great, your kids will love it and so will you!