Top 10 Batman Movies

Batman is part man part bat but mostly man with some bat qualities but no bat DNA. Bruce Wayne’s millionaire parents probably did have sex with bats because rich people are weird, but they never created a bat person hybrid. Bruce Wayne is just a rich dude with a bat fursona that tosses on his bat costume to yiff crime. There are movies.

#10 – Batman and Others

Batman is part of a surprisingly large community of furries and cosplayers, and Batman and Others is the movie where director Joel Schumacher finally stops pretending otherwise. Batman attends what I can only assume is Gotham’s annual FurCon with his young partner Robin—the “we fuckin’, but we’re bein’ vague about it” kind of partner—a young man whose birdsona has nipples. They soon meet Batgirl, who has also decided that dressing like a flying mammal and beating strangers at night is a perfectly reasonable hobby. Unfortunately, she’s related to Commissioner Gordon, so she has to keep the whole thing secret. It would look terrible if Gotham discovered his family was attending conventions in fetishwear and inviting strangers to come explore her moist Batcave.

Unfortunately, FurCon also attracts some real fucking weirdos. Poison Ivy shows up as a horny plant lady accompanied by some enormous dumbass doing the worst Bane cosplay I’ve ever seen. Then there’s Mr. Freeze, a man whose ice fetish has completely consumed his personality. He talks about ice. He makes ice puns. He freezes people. Every goddamn sentence somehow circles back to winter. Arnold Schwarzenegger reportedly got paid $25 million for this movie, which means someone paid him roughly the GDP of a small island nation to say shit like “Ice to see you.” Meanwhile George Clooney spends the entire movie wearing a rubber batsuit with nipples. People say Batman and Others nearly killed the franchise, but I say Gotham FurCon simply wasn’t ready for mainstream audiences.

#9 – Batman Furever

Furries are some of the most oppressed people in the world. I know this because whenever I dress up in my rabbit fursona and have sex with my fiancée, people become incredibly judgmental. Suddenly everybody is screaming things like, “You can’t do that in Burger King!” and “Sir, not in front of my Grandmother!” Batman understands this persecution. Ever since watching his millionaire parents get murdered by a Crime Man, Bruce Wayne has struggled with his true identity as a bat. So in Joel Schumacher’s Batman Furever, Batman teams up with his suspiciously quotation-mark-worthy “partner” Robin to create a world where every furry can proudly put on $4,000 worth of foam and latex without fear. Standing in their way are the violently anti-fur Riddler, played by Jim Carrey with so much pelvic energy that I’m pretty sure he has an orgasm somewhere around the second act, and Two-Face, played by Tommy Lee Jones as a man with two faces. A left face and a right face. Presumably everything else is doubled too. I’m not going to draw you a diagram.

Batman Furever is incredibly colorful, incredibly loud, and looks like somebody poured a barrel of radioactive Skittles directly into Joel Schumacher’s eyes, so you might mistake it for harmless family entertainment. DO NOT SHOW THIS MOVIE TO YOUR CHILDREN. Behind all the neon lights and Jim Carrey screaming is some of the most depraved hardcore fursuit fuckin’ ever smuggled into a PG-13 blockbuster. Batman and Robin are constantly rubbing rubber against each other, Nicole Kidman spends the entire movie visibly desperate to get inside Batman’s fursona, and Gotham itself appears to be one enormous fetish club that occasionally experiences crime. Watch Batman Furever responsibly. I don’t want to receive another email from an angry parent demanding to know why their eight-year-old is suddenly asking for a batsona.

#8 – The Dark Knight Rises

Batman sometimes calls himself “The Dark Knight,” but I need to make something very clear: Batman is not a legally recognized knight. He was dubbed “The Dark Knight” by the king at a Medieval Times restaurant, and that man does not possess the constitutional authority to grant knighthoods. I learned this myself after an extremely expensive legal battle involving an incident at Medieval Times that my lawyer has advised me to stop describing publicly. Apparently being touched on the shoulders with a decorative sword does not make you a knight, you cannot demand that police officers address you as “Sir Kontributor,” and yelling “I HAVE DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY!” while being dragged through a parking lot only adds charges. Batman hasn’t learned any of this yet, though, so he genuinely believes he’s a knight. He even finds a neighborhood girl named Selina who likes pretending she’s a cat, and together they hang out in his expensive treehouse playing The Knight and the Pussycat.

Unfortunately, there’s also a man named Bane, and Bane is not fucking playing. While Batman and Catgirl are putting on costumes and deciding which one gets to pet the kitty, Bane is snapping necks, blowing shit up, trapping an entire police department underground and overthrowing Gotham’s government. This is the equivalent of two children playing cops and robbers in the backyard when an actual Colombian drug cartel suddenly comes over the fence. Batman nevertheless puts on his little rubber knight costume, Catwoman puts on her kitty ears, and together they decide they’re going to play pretend directly at the enormous terrorist built like a refrigerator. It does not go particularly well. Turns out the king at Medieval Times didn’t teach Batman shit about fighting Bane.

#7 – Batman (1966)

This is a very old movie from 1966, when bats had only recently been discovered and scientists were still trying to determine exactly what the fuck they were. Where did bats come from? What do bats eat? Why do they fly? Are they birds? What is bat? These were serious questions facing America at the time, and Batman bravely attempts to answer them through the story of one confused young man searching for his place in the natural world. Everyone around Batman already understands what they are. The Penguin knows exactly what a penguin is. Catwoman understands cats. The Riddler knows what a riddle is. The Joker has spent years studying the ancient art of jokes. But Batman? Batman doesn’t know shit about bats.

So Batman spends the movie conducting experiments. Do bats drive cars? Apparently. Do bats own helicopters? Sure. Do bats wear utility belts containing an endless supply of highly specialized equipment? Science remains divided. At one point Batman is attacked by a shark and immediately produces a can labeled SHARK REPELLENT BAT-SPRAY, raising significantly more questions about bats than it answers. He wanders Gotham desperately seeking knowledge from everyone he encounters. “Please, Cesar Romero, tell me, what is bat?” But Cesar Romero cannot help him. None of them can. Batman must discover the truth for himself. Perhaps the real bat was inside him all along. Perhaps the bat was the friends he made along the way. Perhaps bat is not something you understand. Perhaps bat simply is.

#6 Batman (1989)

Batman was the first Batman movie directed by Tim Burton, a filmmaker who is significantly more popular in Canada than he is in the United States. Canadians fucking love Tim Burton. They love him so much that there are thousands of restaurants across Canada called Tim Burtons, where citizens gather every morning to drink coffee, eat donuts and discuss whether Edward Scissorhands was an allegory for suburban conformity. Burton came south in 1989 to make a movie about Batman playing pretend against the Joker, played by famous comedian Jack Nicholson. Nicholson tells many jokes throughout the movie, all of which are solid because he is a professional comedian and Batman is required to stand there looking pissed off until he’s finished.

Naturally, Batman became a massive success because playing pretend was incredibly popular in the 1980s. Americans played pretend that trickle-down economics would eventually trickle down. They played pretend that declaring a War on Drugs would make drugs disappear. Cocaine was everywhere, Wall Street was eating the country alive, and everyone agreed the solution was probably to give rich people more money and see what happened. So of course audiences immediately connected with billionaire Bruce Wayne, a man who inherited an unimaginable fortune and decided the best way to improve his crime-ridden city was not housing, education, healthcare or economic investment, but dressing like a giant bat and punching poor people from the roof of his custom military vehicle. Bruce Wayne never stopped the drugs and he sure as fuck never trickled down his economics, but he did have a cool car. That’s the 1980s.

#5 – Batman Returns

Batman returns. I don’t know what else you want me to fucking say. It’s right there in the title: Batman Returns. At the end of Batman, Bruce had to go home because it was getting late and Alfred said dinner was ready, so everybody was like, “Okay, Batman, thanks for playing. Return sometime and we can play pretend again.” And Batman said he would. Two years later, Batman keeps his promise. He returns. That’s integrity. That’s character development. Christopher Nolan needed three movies to tell you something Tim Burton accomplished with one verb.

And Batman does a tremendous amount of returning in this movie. He returns to Gotham. He returns to the Batsuit. He returns to the Batmobile. Sometimes he leaves somewhere and then returns to that same place later. Fuck, Batman is constantly returning. Eventually Michelle Pfeiffer dresses like a cat and Danny DeVito crawls out of a sewer, but those are secondary concerns. The important thing is that Batman said he would return, and the son of a bitch returned. Then the movie ends and he goes home again. Presumably because it’s time for dinner.

#4 – Batman is a Lego

Ever since Batman movies were invented, companies have sold toys so children can play pretend with the play-pretend furry man at home. There were Batman action figures, Batman cars, Batman costumes, Batman lunchboxes and probably Batman-branded lead paint if you were a child in the 1960s. Eventually the toys became so popular that Hollywood realized they could eliminate the unnecessary middleman of making a movie and then selling toys based on it. Why not just make the toy itself the fucking movie? And so we got Batman is a Lego, a feature-length commercial in which Batman has finally achieved his ultimate form: a tiny piece of plastic you can buy at Target.

I assume the movie was created when several ancient entertainment executives gathered around the Big Movie Table and asked, “What kind of pretend should Batman play next? Should he play with penguins? Scarecrows?” Then one wrinkled story elder raised his hand and said, “What if Batman poked you directly in the foot while you were walking barefoot to the bathroom at three in the morning?” Another whispered, “What if Batman got sucked into the vacuum cleaner and rattled around in there until you had to turn it off and dig him out?” Finally, an old woman who had not spoken in decades opened her eyes and said, “What if a toddler choked on Batman?” The room fell silent. They knew they had their movie. Warner Bros. turned Batman into a Lego, made hundreds of millions of dollars, and added it to the enormous treasure pile where movie studios sleep at night like dragons.

#3 – The Dark Knight

Batman gets to hang out with the Jokester again, except this Jokester isn’t funny at all. He’s extremely serious and keeps murdering people, which Batman finds confusing because that’s not what jokesters are supposed to do. Batman keeps waiting for the punchline, but the Jokester just blows up a hospital. Even professional clowns are horrified by this guy. Somewhere there’s a man named Bubbles wearing size-38 shoes and making balloon giraffes at a six-year-old’s birthday party who sees the Joker on television and thinks, “Jesus Christ, dude. You’re making the rest of us look bad.” The Joker says he wants to watch the world burn, which is a terrible philosophy for a clown.

Batman realizes that defeating the actor from A Knight’s Tale will require him to play pretend harder than he’s ever played pretend before. If Heath Ledger was once a knight, Batman reasons, then Batman must also become a knight. So Bruce goes to the Gotham Medieval Times restaurant, orders the Royalty Package and gets ceremonially dubbed The Dark Knight by Lucius Fox, who works at Wayne Enterprises during the day but apparently plays the king on weekends for extra money. Bruce takes this ceremony completely fucking seriously. Lucius tries explaining that it’s just part of the dinner show, but it’s too late. Batman is already kneeling with his head bowed while Alfred takes pictures. This is how Batman becomes the Dark Knight, and—as we learned in The Dark Knight Rises—it will eventually lead to several arrests, an expensive legal battle and the devastating discovery that the king at Medieval Times isn’t actually the king of anything.

#2 – Batman Starts

Batman Starts is the weakest movie in the Dark Knight trilogy and therefore the weakest movie ever made. That’s just mathematics. Despite this, it’s extremely well written, beautifully directed and has almost the perfect tone for a serious and realistic interpretation of the Furry Crusader. This time we get to see how Batman actually started being Batman, back when Bruce Wayne was just a confused billionaire wandering around the world trying to figure out what kind of animal he wanted to be. Eventually he settles on “bat,” puts on the costume and begins the long journey that will eventually end with him mistakenly believing he’s a legally recognized knight because some guy at Medieval Times touched him with a sword. Every legend has to start somewhere.

More importantly, Batman Starts introduces The Rizz Al Skibidi, one of Batman’s greatest villains, played to absolute perfection by Liam Neeson. The Rizz Al Skibidi teaches Bruce how to fight, how to disappear theatrically in the middle of conversations, and presumably how to obtain the rizz necessary to become Gotham’s most eligible furry billionaire. We also get Scarecrow, who puts a bag on his head and sprays people with fear drugs, making him one of the few Batman villains whose name and activities actually have some relationship to each other. Christian Bale is fantastic, Liam Neeson is fantastic, the story is fantastic, and it launched what I consider to be the greatest story ever told. Still the weakest movie of all time, though.

#1 The Batman

The Batman is the worst Batman movie ever made and possibly the worst movie ever made, which raises the extremely reasonable question of why the fuck I put it at #1 on my list of the Top 10 Batman Movies. I don’t know. The rankings have already been submitted. The ballots were certified. There’s apparently nothing we can do now. This movie shouldn’t even be on the list. You know that episode of Batman: The Animated Series called “I’ve Got Batman in My Basement,” where some kid basically finds Batman and keeps him in his basement? Put that here instead. Put Joker here. Put an episode of Paw Patrol here and tell me the German shepherd is Batman. Anything but this. Unfortunately, democracy has spoken, and apparently democracy thinks The Batman is the greatest Batman movie ever made. Fuck democracy.

My biggest problem is that nobody in this movie commits to their fursona. There’s a guy called the Penguin, but does he look like a penguin? No. He’s just Colin Farrell wearing enough prosthetics to look like somebody who owns three failing Italian restaurants. Then there’s Catwoman, who puts some little ears on her head but otherwise makes almost no effort to behave like a cat. Does she knock a glass off a table while maintaining eye contact? Does she suddenly sprint through the apartment at three in the morning for no fucking reason? Does she ever lick her own butthole? Not once. These people need to understand that if you’re going to FurCon, you have to fucking COMMIT. Batman understands this. That lunatic built a car around his fursona. Meanwhile Penguin just waddles into Gotham looking like Fat Colin Farrell and expects us to play along. Absolutely disgraceful. Congratulations on being the #1 Batman movie. Get fucked, The Batman.