Batman first appeared in Detective Comics #27, cover-dated May 1939, created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger. Since then seven actors have led a theatrical Batman film, four Emmy Awards have gone to a Batman cartoon, and a Batman game has tied for the highest-rated release of its year. He is also back in front of cameras right now: photography on The Batman: Part II began on 12 June 2026, and in mid-July the release moved to 18 February 2028. Below he turns up in sixteen rankings — a few he could plausibly win, several where he is one name among giants, and one about football haircuts.
The catch is that the answer keeps changing. Pick a different list, and Batman becomes a different thing entirely.
The argument starts inside his own franchise
Before any other character shows up, Batman films disagree with each other. This ranking's field runs from Adam West's 1966 romp to Matt Reeves's 2022 noir, and takes in the animated features too. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008) is the usual answer — Heath Ledger's posthumous Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor was the first acting Oscar won by a comic-book film. Tim Burton's Batman (1989) has the older claim: $402 million worldwide, and it turned Michael Keaton's casting from a joke into a vindication. Batman & Robin (1997) is in the same field, which tells you how wide the spread is.
Open it up to all of DC and he still owns a quarter of the list
Widen the question to every DC superhero film and four of the sixteen entries are Batman's: the 1989 original, Batman Begins, Batman Returns and The Batman. The rest is the whole of DC — Superman (1978), Wonder Woman, Man of Steel, Aquaman, Watchmen, Shazam!, Zack Snyder's Justice League, The Suicide Squad and Joker. Joker (2019) passed $1 billion and won Joaquin Phoenix an Academy Award, which is the studio's biggest recent critical and commercial success — and it is a Gotham film built out of Batman's mythology with Batman himself absent.
Judge sequels only, and Marvel walks in
Narrow the category to superhero sequels and Batman's single entry, Batman Returns (1992), lands in a field that is mostly Marvel: Spider-Man 2, Avengers: Infinity War, Endgame, Logan, X2, Thor: Ragnarok, Captain America: Civil War. Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 (2004) is the perennial answer to this question. Batman Returns is the strangest big-studio superhero film of its era — Danny DeVito's Penguin, Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman, and a Christmas setting — and it took $266.8 million, well short of the 1989 film. Its reputation has climbed steadily since, which is the case for it.
Count franchises instead of films and he shrinks
Stop ranking individual Batman films and rank Batman the franchise, and the scale changes. He is one of thirty-two entries next to Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, James Bond and Star Trek. Marvel Studios passed $30 billion at the global box office in December 2025; every live-action Batman film ever released, from 1966 to 2022, adds up to a small fraction of that. James Bond has 25 official films and six decades of continuous production. This is the lens where the most-filmed superhero in history becomes a mid-size franchise.
On a Tim Burton list, Batman stops being a superhero
Two of the twelve films on this list are Batman's, and they are there as Burton films rather than comic-book films — sharing the shelf with Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Ed Wood and Big Fish. Burton took the 1989 job with one hit behind him; Batman made him a blockbuster director and bought him the freedom to make Edward Scissorhands the following year. Judged this way the argument is Anton Furst's Oscar-winning production design and Danny Elfman's score, not the cape. It is also the only ranking here where Batman competes against a man with scissors for hands.
The man in the suit right now, judged on everything else
The Batman (2022) appears on a list of Robert Pattinson's own films, against The Lighthouse, Good Time, Tenet, High Life, Cosmopolis, Mickey 17 and Twilight. This is the timely one. Photography on The Batman: Part II began on 12 June 2026 at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, with location work in London, Liverpool and Glasgow; Scarlett Johansson and Sebastian Stan joined as Gilda and Harvey Dent, and Charles Dance as Dent's father. In mid-July 2026 the release slid to 18 February 2028 for post-production. Pattinson's case on this list is range — a decade of small strange films between two very large ones.
Leave cinema entirely and he is competing with Springfield
Batman: The Animated Series ran on Fox Kids from September 1992 to September 1995 and won four Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Animated Program. On a list of the best animated television ever made it faces The Simpsons, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Arcane, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Samurai Jack. Kevin Conroy voiced Batman here and went on to voice him in the Arkham games, becoming the definitive Batman for a generation that never watched a Keaton film. The show's "dark deco" design is why it is on all-time lists at all, rather than only on cartoon-nostalgia ones.
Animation is the one medium he genuinely dominates
Eight of the fifteen DC animated films on this list carry Batman's name: Mask of the Phantasm, Under the Red Hood, both parts of The Dark Knight Returns, Year One, Assault on Arkham, The Long Halloween Part 1 and Hush. Mask of the Phantasm got a theatrical release in 1993 and was nominated for Best Animated Film at the 1994 Annie Awards — the first comic-book film to be nominated there. The non-Batman entries are Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, Wonder Woman, Superman: Doomsday, Superman: Red Son and Teen Titans: The Judas Contract. DC's direct-to-video animation has been a Batman operation for thirty years.
Back on the page, where he started
Two of the sixteen graphic novels here have Batman's name on the cover — Year One (1987, Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli) and Hush (2002–03, Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee) — but The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke and The Long Halloween are Batman books too, so five of sixteen are his without the title saying so. The field around him is comics' canon: Watchmen, Kingdom Come, Marvels, Daredevil: Born Again, The Infinity Gauntlet, All-Star Superman. Batman is the most adapted single character in comics, and this is the list where you can see why — the source material keeps producing books other writers treat as landmarks.
A console generation's twenty best games, and one is a Batman game
Batman: Arkham City (Rocksteady, 2011) is on a list of the greatest Xbox 360 games alongside Halo 3, Mass Effect 2, Red Dead Redemption, Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto IV, BioShock, Portal 2 and Dark Souls. It tied for the highest-rated game of 2011 on Metacritic, won BAFTAs for Action Game and for Mark Hamill's performance as the Joker, and took Best Xbox 360 Game at that year's Spike awards. Licensed superhero games were a byword for cash-in until Rocksteady's Arkham trilogy; this is the entry that ended the joke, and it is why Batman belongs on a list about a console rather than a character.
Sort games by engine, of all things, and he is still there
This is the strangest lens in the article: a ranking organised by the middleware a game was built on. Batman: Arkham Knight (2015), the last of Rocksteady's Arkham trilogy, is there on Unreal Engine 3, against Fortnite, Black Myth: Wukong, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Hogwarts Legacy, BioShock Infinite, Final Fantasy VII Remake and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Fortnite is Epic's own showcase for the engine and has generated billions. Arkham Knight earns its place on rain-slicked Gotham and a drivable Batmobile — a technical argument in which the character is almost incidental.
Even the LEGO shelf holds three of him
TT Games has built LEGO games around a dozen franchises, and Batman got three of the fourteen entries here: LEGO Batman: The Videogame (2008), LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (2012) and LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. LEGO Batman 2 was the first game in the series with full voice acting, and the first to give players an open-world Gotham to fly around. Only Star Wars matches that count, with The Complete Saga and The Skywalker Saga; Harry Potter, Marvel, Jurassic World and The Lord of the Rings each get one or two. Batman also got a feature film out of it, The Lego Batman Movie (2017).
Here the Batman film is not Batman's — it is Catwoman's
Batman Returns (1992) appears on a list of Michelle Pfeiffer performances, against Scarface, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Dangerous Liaisons and The Age of Innocence. Pfeiffer took the role after Annette Bening left the production, trained in martial arts, practised with a bullwhip and performed most of her own stunts; Peter Travers called her "a classic dazzler" in Rolling Stone. Thirty years on, hers is still the reference Catwoman against which every other version is measured.
The point of this section is what happens to the frame. On every other list here, the Batman entry is on the strength of Batman. On this one it is on the strength of the person in the other costume.
On Jim Carrey's shelf, a Batman film has fourteen rivals
Jim Carrey played the Riddler in Batman Forever (1995), Joel Schumacher's neon reset with Val Kilmer under the cowl and Nicole Kidman as Dr. Chase Meridian. It out-grossed Batman Returns — over $336 million worldwide — and arrived in the middle of Carrey's extraordinary run. That is the strongest case for it, and it is not very strong here. The list it lands on holds The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Ace Ventura and Man on the Moon — two of which are the films people cite when arguing Carrey was owed an Academy Award nomination. Being a Batman film buys nothing on somebody else's filmography.
He got his name into a Superman title, and it did not help
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) qualifies for a ranking of Superman films because Superman is in it, with Ben Affleck's Batman opposite Henry Cavill. The company it keeps is unforgiving: Richard Donner's Superman (1978), which made audiences believe a man could fly and set the template every superhero film since has borrowed, plus Superman II, the Donner Cut, Man of Steel and James Gunn's Superman (2025). Batman v Superman took $873 million and still split critics and audiences hard enough that Warner Bros. rebuilt its entire DC film plan afterwards. On this list, being Batman is a liability rather than an advantage.
And then there is the football-haircut ranking
In 2021, during a Brazil training camp, Neymar bleached his hair and had a Batman logo shaved into the side of his head. That is enough to put "Neymar's Batman Logo" on a ranking of the sixteen most iconic hairstyles in football history, next to Ronaldo's triangle at the 2002 World Cup, David Beckham's mohawk, Ruud Gullit's dreadlocks and Carlos Valderrama's afro. Batman has never played football and is not the subject of this ranking — a haircut is. He is on it anyway, and that is the whole argument of this article in one entry: a character can be known widely enough that his logo shows up in a list about hair.
Sixteen questions, sixteen different Batmen
Sometimes the whole subject, sometimes a footnote — it depends entirely on which question you ask. Ask which Batman film is best and you get an argument about Nolan and Burton. Ask about game engines, animated television or Michelle Pfeiffer's career and Batman turns into a supporting detail on somebody else's list. Neither version is wrong; they are answers to different questions. It's the same trick behind every ranking here — judging things two at a time.
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More rankings, more angles
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- How Many Ways Can You Rank Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson? — wrestling ring to box-office record
- How Head-to-Head Voting Works — the mechanic behind every ranking here