Oh, all right. I’ll list all the Batman movies since 1989. Well, just the ones released theatricallyt. But anyone who votes for either of the ones with Bane in it, will be mocked mercilessly by the merciless mocking brigade.
Poll in a moment.
I think the one with Adam West was before 89. 
Anyway, I voted for the Adam West Batman as well as Mask of the Phantasm.
Burton’s were good but I think he had just a little too much love for the dark circus stuff. Not everyone in the movie needs to be a freak, do they?
There is nothing good to say about Schumacher’s Batman movies.
Nolan’s just aren’t quite right in depicting Batman, imo. His efforts for dark and realistic ended up giving us an angry guy who growls a lot and is walking around in a black armored combat suit.
Say what you want about the '66 era and its goofy, colorful, kitchiness but I say they got the character right. Bruce Wayne is a charming rich bachelor (Miss Kitka? Rrrow!), he’s buds with Robin, shows some detective skills, and has the smarts and gadgets to win the day. Exploding sharks are just the icing on the iceberg.
Mask of the Phantasm was a damn good movie and I thought that it was the best of the Batman movies to come out in the 90s. As I recall, Batman being chased by the cops seemed to go on a little too long but I would have to see this movie again to confirm. And the voicework! Kevin Conroy! Mark Hamill! Dana Delany! Stacy Keach! Abe Vigoda! Dick Miller! Dick Miller!
Adam West & Co were great… for their time. No one has yet filled the catsuit better than Julie and no one sounded more like a cat than Eartha.
Tim Burton’s was pretty good - Michael Keaton was a great Bruce, but not so good as Batman. Jack was fantastic, and Kim looked good. The art gallery scene was stupendous. Gotham has never looked better.
Honestly,the Dark Knight is over-rated due to Heath Ledger, who acted the fuck out of his role- but that role wasn’t The Joker.
“Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb.”
Michelle Pfeiffer in a backless gown.
I gotta go with Tim Burton’s BATMAN with Keaton and Basinger. I liked Basinger. And Keaton hit the right tortured hero tone for the part. And that’s saying something, since I’ve never liked Keaton in anything, before or since. Beetlejuice? What a piece of crap. And Birdman was the weirdest, most pointless waste of film I’ve ever seen. That’s two hours I’ll never get back. Oh, sorry, I lost control there – end of hijack.
I guess I have to vote for the Tim Burton Batman, not having seen Mask of the Phantasm. It wasn’t a complete success – the Joker’s origin story was more interesting than Batman’s, but Michael Keaton made a surprisingly convincing Bruce Wayne/Batman and Jack Nicholson got to chew up the scenery. Points deducted because the Batplane shot bullets. Even more points deducted because he couldn’t hit anything.
That series headed downhill pretty quickly – the Penguin was a little too disgusting and the less said about the next two, the better.
The Nolan Dark Knight series started out by plagiarizing “The Shadow” and departed further from the Batman mythos with each movie. As near as I can tell, in that universe, the Batman existed for maybe a year? Maybe a few months? Maybe less? Batman saves the city in the first movie and at the end, we find out the Joker has arrived. The Joker does his crazy stuff for a few weeks and at the end of the movie, the Dark Knight disappears in “disgrace”. Also, Bruce Wayne becomes a recluse at the same time and (almost) no one ever puts 2+2 together.
I can’t speak to the third movie because I’m still trying to watch it – it’s on my TIVO, but it’s so badly plotted and crafted and utterly bleak that I haven’t gotten past the first 45 minutes yet. (I note that Wikipedia says that The Dark Knight Rises is one of the most critically acclaimed movies of 2012, but I’m thinking it’s like Titanic in that regard – a few years went by and everyone went “What was I thinking?”)
Batman Returns is what made me fall in love with Batman.
The Nolan movies made me fall out of love for him. Seriously, it literally dropped him off my “favorite superhero” spot. Now I don’t like him very much.
The Burton movies were very good, Phantasm was very good, and the Nolan ones were great, in my view. Schumacher ones were terrible and I find the Adam West Batman stuff cringeworthy, but then I saw them after the Burton movies, so that might have made them seem extra-silly.
Yeah, you had to see them in their time, which was when “camp” was in and “dark and gritty” was out. I prefer camp to dark and gritty as I am so fucking tired of dark and gritty.
Burton’s BATMEN are better than Nolan’s because they’re less realistic, and as has been observed before, Batman as a concept stops working if you get too realistic. Examine it to closely and it’s more ridiculous than the Superman concept, which at least has the handwave that Clark is a demigod who kind of wishes he were mortal. But when you do Batman as if he were living in the real world, you come to the unavoidable conclusion that (a) all that shit is as impossible as laser vision; (b) Alfred really dropped the ball in never getting Bruce to therapy; and (c) adult Bruce is an entitled dick who really needs a Wonder Woman delivered beatdown.
That said, RETURNS is the better of the Burton movies. It remembers something that the first one forgot: Bruce Wayne is broken. He’s not insane exactly; he’s just never going to be happy, even though he’s earned happiness, because joy just isn’t in him. As I’ve written before, Bruce is well and truly sick of being Batman by the end of the movie – hell, by the Christmas party scene. He just doesn’t know how to do anything else.
Because you’re a wise woman. For a Knickerbocker, anyway. Seriously, how do you put up with all that white shit that falls from the sky every winter? I think it’s called snose or something? I’ve seen pictures and it looks uncomfortable.
I have offered multiple times to erase your memories of those films and/or have the Nolan-beast locked in a cell with Nancy Grace. At this point I must conclude that you are anhedonic.
It’s massively unfair to compare the Adam West Batman to the others, which of course is why I did it. (That and my policy of always contradicting myself in threads.) West’s Batman was never meant to be taken seriously. I recall somebody on the boards who hated the series because he felt it existed simply to mock comics fans.
With one exception. There’s an episode of the series in whch the Riddler has Robin captive in a museum and is about to torture him, and Batman, coming to the rescue, comes as close to losing his shit as an emotionally constipated jackhole can. He effortlessly beats the crap out of Riddler’s minions (except for one who wisely chooses to get the fuck out of Dodge because Bats is no longer holding back), then roughs up Riddler a good deal more than was strictly necessary. I saw that one earlier this year on AntennaTV and thought, “Yeah, THAT is Batman. He only thinks he’s stoic.”
Returns without question is the best, the next nearest is the first Keaton one but not all that great.
I don’t get the love for TDK. It was really badly written. Over and over: “Nope, no one would go along with that. Nope.” Bale was terrible in all of his. OTOH, Ledger was the best Joker so far.
I’m a Silver Age DC comics fan. After TDK I gave up on these films. They became generic action movies that could have been about any set of characters.
I actually kind of consider Birdman to be part of the Batman film canon now.
I am not a native new Yorker, you know this, right? If you catch me just right I consider myself a Michigander. I spent most of my formative years there. And the snow is pretty…for about seventeen seconds. Then it’s just gross. But I still prefer it to GIANT HAIRY BUGS which you all have down in the South.
They keep coming back. 
It’s like trauma. But I did love the Joker in the Nolan films. I rewatched it to see if it was actually good or just hype, but Ledger really did an amazing job.
The 1943 serial has the anti-Japanese racism all other Batman incarnations lack, with J Carrol Naish as the Japanese mastermind you love to hate. Plus it’s got hypnotized mopes doing his bidding, man-eating alligators, the walls are closing in, knockout pills, and Batman losing nearly every fight he’s in. And it’s all so…sincere.
Oh, fine. I guess the Burton and Nolan ones are cool, too.
Dead Japanese guy coming back to life just long enough to deliver a sinister message!
After West and Ward did Batman and Robin, the world no longer needed anyone to try putting them on screens big or little.
Those are found in the country. I live in the city. Admittedly it’s a city rife with racial tensions and completely lacking in hobbits, but still. And the racial tension aren’t even all bad. You never have to wonder who’s a racist. The racist just come right out and tell you.
Is this Adam West? I can’t watch any youtube videos at work.
Adam West was 15, and probably in the audience, when this came out.
Thank you dear! I was too lazy to go look up when the Adam West serial came out. I’ve never seen it, but I would have been distressed to find that it was racist.
Adam West never did a Batman serial. He was in the Batman TV show that came out in 1966, and the feature film it inspired.