Goyer Talks Withholding Batman In “Begins”

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins,” the film that effectively set the modern template for rebooting a franchise, especially a franchise seen as having fallen into a parody of itself.

The film was co-written by Nolan and David S. Goyer, the “Blade” and “Dark City” writer and filmmaker who is still very much around in the industry who has multiple TV series going on right now – he’s an executive producer on “Murderbot,” and is a writer/producer on both “Foundation” and “The Sandman” which are both launching new seasons soon.

Appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, he reflected on ‘Begins’ and how Warner Bros. Pictures was not happy at all about the way the film took a good hour before it had Christian Bale’s Bryce Wayne finally get in to costume as Batman:

“They were not happy about that. No disrespect to the actors who played Bruce Wayne prior to this, and as moviegoers we were always twiddling our thumbs waiting for the character to get into costume and for the movie to begin. But why is that?

We knew fairly early on that we needed to have the audience fall in love with Bruce Wayne. We had to have an amazing action sequence that involved Bruce Wayne and not Batman. That’s how we came up with that massive escape from the temple and him sliding down the ice.”

One way he and Nolan quelled the studio’s concern was to offer a presentation of four other superhero original movies, including Richard Donner’s “Superman,” and “clocked the minute into the film the character had put on the costume… We weren’t that much farther than them.”

Goyer and Nolan continued working with Nolan throughout “The Dark Knight” trilogy and into the start of the DC Snyderverse with “Man of Steel”. Goyer continued on with “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” but Nolan advised him not to continue with Batman beyond that.

That included the proposed Ben Affleck-directed Batman feature that was in development for a short while there: “I remember Chris advising me not to work on the Affleck Batman, just because it’s confusing. We did one and just stick with that.” Check out the full interview here:

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