Every live-action Batman since 1943, from Adam West to Christian Bale

This one is nostalgia for me. It conjures up all sorts of memories of going to Steve’s Newsstand in Clyde, Ohio, searching for that one comic I could buy. That newsstand is no longer in existence, but that has not changed my excitement in seeing good triumph over evil doers. Superman was a go to as was Batman. Both caped were crusaders fighting for what’s good in the world.

Nine actors have played Batman in live-action studio pictures since 1943, and Robert Pattinson is filming his second one now. My personal favorite star was most certainly Christian Bale. He owned the Dark Knight persona.

The serials and Adam West

Lewis Wilson was first. Columbia Pictures put Batman on screen in a 15-chapter serial in 1943, the kind of cliffhanger that ran before the Saturday feature. He played Batman as a wartime government agent chasing a Japanese spy, Dr. Daka, in a serial full of the propaganda of its day. Robert Lowery took the cape for Columbia’s Batman and Robin serial in 1949.

If you met Batman on a television set in the 1960s, you met Adam West. ABC’s Batman premiered on Jan. 12, 1966. Batman: The Movie followed that July 30, between the show’s first and second seasons. He played it straight, a square-jawed millionaire who never passed up a chance to give a speech about civic duty or buckling your seat belt. The show mentioned the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents only a few times.

Michael Keaton

When Warner Bros. cast Michael Keaton in 1988, fans were furious. He was known for comedies. People thought he was too small for the part. The studio got tens of thousands of angry letters. When Tim Burton’s Batman opened on June 23 the next year, it became the biggest movie of 1989 in the United States. Keaton played Bruce Wayne as a man who might be more comfortable behind the mask than without it, and he did most of his acting with his eyes, because the rubber suit barely let him turn his neck.

Jack Nicholson’s Joker took over the first picture. Batman Returns, on June 19, 1992, belonged as much to Danny DeVito’s Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman as to Keaton. Keaton passed on the third film. He has said the new director, Joel Schumacher, asked him why everything had to be so dark, and he could see Schumacher wasn’t going to budge.

Val Kilmer and George Clooney

Val Kilmer took over the suit in Schumacher’s Batman Forever, which opened on June 16, 1995. He looked right in it. His Bruce Wayne was still haunted by his parents’ deaths, and the film gave him a psychologist, Nicole Kidman’s Chase Meridian, to talk it through with. The picture around him was neon. Jim Carrey’s Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones’s Two-Face took most of the attention. Kilmer died on April 1, 2025, at 65.

George Clooney followed in Batman & Robin on June 20, 1997, in a suit that kept the sculpted nipples from Batman Forever. You may remember the suit better than the movie. Clooney has joked about it for years. “Sorry about the nipples on the suit,” he told a New York Comic Con crowd in 2014, and he told Howard Stern in 2020, “I’m terrible in it.” In December 2025 he was joking the other way, telling Variety, “I was the best Batman, and you know it.”

Christian Bale

Christopher Nolan started over with Batman Begins on June 15, 2005. Christian Bale stepped into the part. He came to it from The Machinist, for which he had dropped to about 120 pounds. For Batman he put on roughly 100. He overshot to around 220, about 30 pounds more than Nolan wanted, and slimmed down to about 190 before filming began in 2004. Nolan shot Gotham like a real city and gave Batman gadgets that looked like somebody built them.

Bale also gave Batman a separate voice, a low growl he has had to defend in interviews. He has explained it plainly: “I can’t do this in a normal voice. I have to become a beast in order to sell this to myself.”

The Dark Knight opened on July 18, 2008. Heath Ledger, who played the Joker, had died that January at 28, and he won the Academy Award for best supporting actor after his death, one of two Oscars the film won from eight nominations. The film earned about $1 billion worldwide and in February 2009 became the first superhero movie to pass that mark. Nolan closed his trilogy four years later with The Dark Knight Rises. It opened on July 20, 2012, with Tom Hardy as Bane, and it took in about $1.08 billion. Bale hung up the cape after that. “We were incredibly fortunate to get to make three,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2013. “That’s enough. Let’s not get greedy.”

Ben Affleck

Ben Affleck arrived in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice on March 25, 2016, playing an older Bruce Wayne who had been at it for 20 years. Zack Snyder drew on Frank Miller’s 1986 comic The Dark Knight Returns. Snyder’s Batman was bigger and angrier. He killed people. He even branded criminals with a bat symbol, something the movie invented. Affleck played him again in Justice League in November 2017 and in Zack Snyder’s Justice League on HBO Max in March 2021.

Affleck had been set to direct and star in a Batman film of his own, but he gave up directing it in 2017 and left the role in early 2019. He came back for a few minutes in The Flash on June 16, 2023, a film that also brought back Keaton and closed with a short appearance by Clooney as Bruce Wayne.

Robert Pattinson

Robert Pattinson’s The Batman opened on March 4, 2022. The director, Matt Reeves, called it “a Year Two story,” with Bruce Wayne two years into the job, working cases like a detective. Paul Dano played the Riddler. Zoë Kravitz played Catwoman, and Colin Farrell, under makeup so heavy he was hard to recognize, played the Penguin and then got his own HBO series, The Penguin, which premiered on Sept. 19, 2024.

The Batman Part II

Reeves started filming The Batman Part II on June 12, 2026, in England. It has been a long wait. The film was first set for October 2025. Warner Bros. pushed it to October 2026 and then to October 2027. On July 15, 2026, the studio moved it again, to Feb. 18, 2028. Jeffrey Wright is back as Jim Gordon, Andy Serkis as Alfred and Farrell as the Penguin, along with Jayme Lawson as Bella Reál and Gil Perez-Abraham as Officer Martinez. Scarlett Johansson and Sebastian Stan have joined. The studio hasn’t said whom they play. Charles Dance, Sebastian Koch and Brian Tyree Henry are new too.

Pattinson told Collider this month that the film is “a real left turn from the first one, but somehow it keeps elements of the kind of feel of it.” James Gunn, who co-runs DC Studios, has defended the gap, writing in December 2024 that “a 5 year gap or more is fairly common in sequels.” Feb. 18, 2028, is about 17 months away.