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Bruce Wayne doesn’t suit up for the first hour of Batman Begins. Director Chris Nolan and screenwriter David Goyer strongly felt that the film would benefit from viewers getting to know Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne as a man before donning the batsuit. However, Warner Bros. Pictures was nervous about this story choice. Luckily, Nolan and Goyer had receipts to help make their case.

“They were not happy about that,” Goyer said, laughingly, during an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused Podcast. “It was twofold. We felt that, no disrespect to the actors that had played Bruce Wayne prior to this, as moviegoers in a lot of these superhero movies, we were always just kind of twiddling our thumbs waiting for the character to get in the costume and for the movie to really begin. And so, we said, why is that?”

“I think unconsciously because a lot of work was put into sort of realizing the hero, but not the man or the woman behind the mask. And so, we knew fairly early on that we needed to have the audience fall in love with Bruce Wayne and that we needed to have an amazing action sequence, as amazing as something from Indiana Jones, that involved Bruce Wayne and not Batman. We just said, pretend Bruce Wayne is James Bond or whomever,” Goyer continues

“If we can do a sequence that is just incredible and heart pounding and he doesn’t have the mask on, then people won’t care whether or not he has the mask on. That will just be the added sauce. And so, that’s how we came up with that massive escape from Ra’s al Ghul’s temple and sliding down the ice.”

However, they still needed to make the case to WB. And thus, Nolan and Goyer watched other superhero films for comparison.

“We were ready to prosecute the case with Warner Bros,” Goyer jokes. “I remember we did a chart, and we did Donner’s Superman, and we did some of the other Batman movies, and we clocked the minute into the film that the characters had put on the costumes, and we weren’t that much farther than that.”

I wonder if they did the same thing to Richard Donner when he made Superman.

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