Batman has been in print since 1939. DC's own character profile puts the first appearance in Detective Comics #27 and has Catwoman and the Joker arriving a year later, in Batman #1, his first solo title.1
He is also, right now, a film stuck in post-production. On 16 July 2026 Matt Reeves moved The Batman: Part II to 18 February 2028 and posted the first camera-test footage of Robert Pattinson back in the suit, leaving the sequel almost six years behind the 2022 film.2
Sixteen rankings below have him in the field — six of them titled after somebody else, and one of them about hair.
Batman is on a ranking of football hairstyles. Nothing else in these sixteen lists shows as plainly how far a logo travels from the character who owns it.
The Dark Knight vs Batman (1989): the fight inside the franchise
Before any other character arrives, Batman films disagree with each other. Fourteen of them are in this field, from Adam West's 1966 comedy to Matt Reeves's 2022 detective story, animated features included.
Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008) is the usual answer. It took $1,008,480,203 worldwide against a $185 million budget,3 and at the 81st Academy Awards Heath Ledger's father, mother and sister collected his Supporting Actor award for playing the Joker.4
Tim Burton's Batman holds the older claim. It opened on 23 June 1989 and finished on $411,569,241 worldwide from a $35 million budget,5 which turned Michael Keaton's casting from a running joke into a vindication and the comic-book blockbuster from a gamble into a business plan.
Batman & Robin is in the same fourteen. Any field that seats Nolan next to Joel Schumacher is measuring what the character has survived as much as what he inspired.
Joker, Aquaman, and the four DC entries that are Batman's
Widen the question to every DC superhero film and four of the sixteen entries belong to Batman: the 1989 original, Batman Begins, Batman Returns and The Batman.
Joker complicates the count. Todd Phillips's 2019 film took $1,078,958,629 worldwide, 42nd on Box Office Mojo's all-time chart,6 and the 92nd Academy Awards gave it Joaquin Phoenix's Leading Actor award and Hildur Guðnadóttir's for original score.7 It is set in Gotham, assembled out of Batman's own supporting cast, and Bruce Wayne is a child in it.
Aquaman settles the money question in nobody's favour. James Wan's 2018 film sits 33rd on the same chart at $1,152,028,393, above every film with Batman's name on it.6
The rest of the shelf is Superman (1978), Wonder Woman, Man of Steel, Watchmen, Shazam!, The Suicide Squad and Zack Snyder's Justice League. Batman supplies a quarter of the entries — and none of the three biggest earners.
Narrow it to sequels and Marvel fills the room
Restrict the category to superhero sequels and Batman gets a single entry. Batman Returns stands in a field Marvel mostly filled: Spider-Man 2, Logan, X2, Thor: Ragnarok, Captain America: Civil War and both halves of the Avengers finale.
Batman Returns is the strangest picture Warner Bros. has released into a summer slot. Danny DeVito's Penguin bites a man's nose, Christopher Walken runs a department store, Gotham is decorated for Christmas throughout, and the film took $266,942,358 worldwide against an $80 million budget.8
Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 (2004) is the perennial answer to this question. Reputation has moved the Burton sequel closer to it every decade since 1992.
Thirty-two franchises: Batman next to Star Wars and James Bond
Rank Batman as a franchise instead of a film and the unit of measurement changes. He is one of thirty-two series here, sharing the list with Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, James Bond and Marvel's films.
Box office argues against him. The biggest Gotham film, The Dark Knight Rises, sits 41st on Box Office Mojo's all-time worldwide chart at $1,085,429,532, a long way below Avengers: Endgame at $2,799,439,100.6
Variety of form is his case. Every other entry is a run of films; Batman is films plus a 1960s sitcom, a Fox cartoon, a game trilogy and a LEGO series, and this ranking counts only the films.
Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, and two Batman films on Tim Burton's shelf
Two of the twelve films on the Tim Burton list are Batman films, entered as his work rather than as comic-book pictures. Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Ed Wood and Big Fish are the neighbours.
Burton had one hit to his name when Warner Bros. handed him Gotham. Batman took $251,409,241 from American and Canadian cinemas,5 and that result bought him the freedom to make a film about a man with blades for fingers the year after.
The 62nd Academy Awards gave Batman its Art Direction award, won by Anton Furst with set decoration by Peter Young.9 That statue is the whole case for the film on a Burton list, because the invented Gotham is what he brought to the character and what Joel Schumacher inherited.
Danny Elfman's score came with it. Both belong to the shelf with Beetlejuice on it rather than to the cape.
Robert Pattinson: Tenet, The Lighthouse and one cowl
The Batman (2022) is one entry on a list of Robert Pattinson's own films, up against Good Time, The Lighthouse, Tenet, High Life, Cosmopolis, Mickey 17 and Twilight.
It is comfortably his biggest: $772,775,278 worldwide, 132nd on the all-time chart.6
The sequel is why Batman is news this summer. Reeves announced the move to 2028 himself, on Vimeo, and Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Charles Dance, Brian Tyree Henry and Sebastian Koch have all joined the cast without a single one of their parts being announced.2
Range is what a list of his own films rewards. A decade of small, difficult pictures sits between Twilight and Gotham, which is why Good Time and The Lighthouse do work here that The Batman cannot.
Kevin Conroy's Batman against The Simpsons
Leave cinema and Batman: The Animated Series has to stand next to The Simpsons, Samurai Jack, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Arcane, Avatar: The Last Airbender and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood.
The Television Academy gave its 1993 Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program to the Fox Batman series, ahead of The Ren & Stimpy Show, Liquid Television and a Peter Rabbit special.10
Kevin Conroy voiced Bruce Wayne on that show and kept the part for three decades, the Arkham games included. For anyone who grew up between Michael Keaton and Christian Bale, Conroy is the voice Batman has.
Its Gotham is 1940s architecture drawn for a weekday children's slot, and DC cartoons have borrowed from it ever since.
Mask of the Phantasm: eight of DC's fifteen animated films are Batman's
Eight of the fifteen DC animated films here carry Batman's name: Mask of the Phantasm, Under the Red Hood, Year One, Assault on Arkham, Hush, The Long Halloween Part 1 and both halves of The Dark Knight Returns.
Warner Bros. put Mask of the Phantasm into cinemas on 25 December 1993, where it took $5,635,204 across North America and $5,863,139 worldwide.11 Small money, and it has been the film DC animation is measured against ever since.
The rest come from the wider roster: Superman: Doomsday, Superman: Red Son, Wonder Woman, Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox and Teen Titans: The Judas Contract.
Direct-to-video is where Batman has no rival inside his own company. The films are cheap, the audience is known, and DC has made them at a steady rate since the Fox cartoon ended.
Frank Miller's Year One next to Watchmen
Two of the sixteen graphic novels here put Batman's name on the cover: Year One (1987, Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli) and Hush (2002–03, Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee). Three more are his without saying so, because The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke and The Long Halloween are Gotham books too.
The company is the medium's canon: Watchmen, Kingdom Come, Marvels, All-Star Superman, The Infinity Gauntlet and Daredevil: Born Again.
Five of sixteen is the largest share Batman takes anywhere on this page, and it comes from the format he was invented in. DC credits the character to Bob Kane with Bill Finger,12 and half the books here go back to retell what those two published in 1939.
Batman: Arkham City on a list about the Xbox 360
Arkham City is Batman's entry among the twenty greatest Xbox 360 games, next to Halo 3, Mass Effect 2, Red Dead Redemption, Skyrim, Portal 2, BioShock and Dark Souls.
BAFTA gave Rocksteady's game the Action award on 16 March 2012, and Mark Hamill took the first Performer award the ceremony ever handed out, for the Joker; the jury called his work "a compelling new dimension of the classic villain psyche".13
Portal 2 collected three BAFTAs that same night, Best Game included, against Arkham City's two.13 Both are on this console list, which is a fair measure of the company a licensed game had to keep.
Licensed superhero games were a punchline before this one. Almost everything else in the twenty is an original property, made by a studio that owned what it was writing — Arkham City is the reason a licence stopped being an excuse.
Sorted by game engine, of all things
One ranking here sorts games by the middleware underneath them, and Batman: Arkham Knight qualifies on Unreal Engine 3, next to Fortnite and Hogwarts Legacy. Nobody has ever picked a Batman game for its engine.
LEGO Batman: three games and a hundred Batsuits
Batman holds three of the fourteen entries on the LEGO list: the 2008 original, LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes from 2012, and Legacy of the Dark Knight.
Warner Bros. Games announced Legacy of the Dark Knight at The Game Awards in December 2025 for a 29 May 2026 launch, listing a hundred Batsuits and outfits drawn from the films, the television series, the comics and the games, plus more than twenty drivable vehicles.14
A hundred costumes assembled out of four media is a fair measure of how many Batmen a player can choose between. Star Wars comes closest here with The Complete Saga and The Skywalker Saga; Harry Potter, Marvel and Jurassic World take one or two each.
Michelle Pfeiffer's list, and the Batman film Catwoman carries
Batman Returns appears on a list of Michelle Pfeiffer performances, against Scarface, Dangerous Liaisons, The Age of Innocence and The Fabulous Baker Boys.
The 62nd Academy Awards is where those two threads first crossed. Pfeiffer was nominated that night for Actress in a Leading Role for The Fabulous Baker Boys and lost to Jessica Tandy, at the same ceremony where Batman collected its Art Direction award.9 Three years later she was wearing the Catwoman suit in the sequel.
Catwoman is the reason the film qualifies here at all, and DC's own history has her arriving in 1940, one issue into Batman's first solo title.1
Everywhere else on this page the Batman entry stands on Batman. Here it stands on the performance of the person in the other costume.
Jim Carrey's Riddler, and the shelf it lands on
Jim Carrey played the Riddler in Batman Forever (1995), Joel Schumacher's neon reset, with Val Kilmer under the cowl and Nicole Kidman as a criminal psychologist.
The field is Carrey's own decade: The Truman Show, Man on the Moon, The Mask, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber and Eternal Sunshine.
Batman Forever is the only one of those that arrived with a franchise attached, and the franchise buys it nothing here. Fourteen rivals, every one of them a Carrey performance rather than a Batman film.
Batman v Superman on a list of Superman films
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) qualifies for a Superman ranking because Superman is in it, Ben Affleck's Batman opposite Henry Cavill's Kal-El.
The company is unforgiving. Richard Donner's Superman (1978) taught every superhero film since how to stage flight, and the field also holds Superman II, the Donner Cut, Man of Steel and James Gunn's 2025 film.
The crossover took $874,362,803 worldwide, 96th on the all-time chart and ahead of Wonder Woman's $823,970,682.6 Warner Bros. rebuilt its DC film plans anyway.
Putting Batman's name in the title of a Superman film worked once at the box office and has not been tried again.
And then there is the football-haircut ranking
Neymar once reported for Brazil duty with bleached hair and the Batman symbol shaved into the side of his head, and that haircut is an option on a ranking of the most iconic hairstyles in football history, next to Ronaldo's triangle, David Beckham's mohawk and Carlos Valderrama's afro. Batman has never played football — the symbol qualifies without him.
Nolan, Burton, and a haircut
Ask which Batman film is best and you get a fight between Christopher Nolan and Tim Burton. Ask about middleware, a Christmas cartoon or Michelle Pfeiffer's career and Batman shrinks to one line on a list named after someone else. Both readings are honest, which is what eighty-seven years of studios rewriting a character does to him.
Every order here came out of a run of two-name choices. That is how a graphic novel and a haircut end up on comparable footing.
If a name in your own head keeps landing in unrelated company, build the list and find out how far it travels.
More rankings, more angles
- What Kind of Best Is Spider-Man? — Marvel's flagship, filed under just as many categories
- How Many Ways Can You Rank Matt Damon? — Bourne, Oscars, and one expensive miss
- Death Note: Thriller, Shonen, or Best Cartoon Ever? — one series, filed under five different genres
- Where Does Harry Potter Actually Rank? — seven books, eight films, sixteen lists
Sources
- DC — official Batman character profile: first appearance in 1939's DETECTIVE COMICS #27, with Catwoman and The Joker introduced in 1940's BATMAN #1, his first solo title: dc.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- Variety, 16 July 2026 — The Batman Part II moved to 18 February 2028, announced by Matt Reeves on Vimeo with the first camera-test footage of Robert Pattinson's return, nearly six years after the March 2022 film; Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Charles Dance, Brian Tyree Henry and Sebastian Koch cast, with their roles still unannounced: variety.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- Box Office Mojo — The Dark Knight (2008): $1,008,480,203 worldwide, $185,000,000 budget: boxofficemojo.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 81st Academy Awards (2009) — Actor in a Supporting Role: Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight, the award accepted by his father Kim Ledger, mother Sally Bell and sister Kate Ledger: oscars.org (checked 2026-08-03)
- Box Office Mojo — Batman (1989), Warner Bros.: 23 June 1989 release, $251,409,241 domestic, $411,569,241 worldwide, $35,000,000 budget: boxofficemojo.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- Box Office Mojo — top lifetime grosses worldwide: Avengers: Endgame $2,799,439,100 (2nd), Aquaman $1,152,028,393 (33rd), The Dark Knight Rises $1,085,429,532 (41st), Joker $1,078,958,629 (42nd), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice $874,362,803 (96th), Wonder Woman $823,970,682 (110th), The Batman $772,775,278 (132nd): boxofficemojo.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 92nd Academy Awards (2020) — Actor in a Leading Role: Joaquin Phoenix for Joker; Music (Original Score): Joker, Hildur Guðnadóttir: oscars.org (checked 2026-08-03)
- Box Office Mojo — Batman Returns (1992): $266,942,358 worldwide, $80,000,000 budget: boxofficemojo.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 62nd Academy Awards (1990) — Art Direction won by Batman (Anton Furst; set decoration Peter Young); Actress in a Leading Role: Michelle Pfeiffer nominated for The Fabulous Baker Boys, the award going to Jessica Tandy: oscars.org (checked 2026-08-03)
- Television Academy — 1993 Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program (For Programming One Hour Or Less): winner Batman: The Series (FOX), with The Ren & Stimpy Show, Liquid Television, Inspector Gadget Saves Christmas and The Tale Of Peter Rabbit And Benjamin Bunny nominated: televisionacademy.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- Box Office Mojo — Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), Warner Bros.: 25 December 1993 release, $5,635,204 domestic and $5,863,139 worldwide: boxofficemojo.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- DC — The Batman (2022) film page: "Batman was created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger"; Matt Reeves directed from a screenplay by Reeves and Peter Craig: dc.com (checked 2026-08-03)
- BAFTA press release, 16 March 2012 — Batman: Arkham City won the Action award and Mark Hamill received his first-ever BAFTA in the new Performer category for the Joker, the jury citing "a compelling new dimension of the classic villain psyche"; Portal 2 won three awards including Best Game: bafta.org (checked 2026-08-03)
- Warner Bros. Games press release, 12 December 2025 — LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight announced at The Game Awards for a 29 May 2026 worldwide launch, with 100 suits and outfits inspired by Batman in film, television, comics and games and over 20 vehicles: press.wbd.com (checked 2026-08-03)