The Batman's Batmobile Almost Looked Like Christopher Nolan's Version
"The Batman" was a bonafide hit in 2021, introducing a whole new take on the Dark Knight that resembled a David Fincher-esque crime drama. The film was director Matt Reeves' gritty, noir-inspired take on the DC Comics superhero, and it mostly worked, even if its inspirations were often a little too overt. After all, "The Batman" was basically "Se7en" with capes. But there were some undeniably cool elements in movie. Case in point: the Batmobile.
Partly inspired by Stephen King's "Christine" and sporting a distinctly rugged look, the Batmobile of "The Batman" was the most beastly yet. Much like the Batsuit in the film, this muscle car Batmobile looked as though Bruce Wayne could have built it in his underground bunker by welding various parts together and fabricating his own hellish creation. As VFX Supervisor Anders Langlands told /Film:
"Matt tends to go for quite grounded, realistic, and quite naturalistic depictions of things in terms of lighting and stuff. And he's always searching for a logical reason for something to be the way that it is. He rarely does that sort of hand-wavy, 'Oh, it's just a movie' kind of thing that some directors like to do."
This grounded approach was Reeves' guiding principle on "The Batman," which tried to tell a story that at times felt even more faithful to reality than even Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, which famously grounded Batman in a cinematic reality. But Reeves wasn't just aping his predecessor's methodology. In fact, it was important to the director to stay clear of anything that could be interpreted as paying homage or borrowing too heavily from previous iterations. That was especially true when the initial Batmobile designs started to resemble the look of the Tumbler from Nolan's trilogy.
Designing the Batmobile
As with all the previous Batman films, the team behind "The Batman" built a fully functional Batmobile. Production designer James Chinlund spoke with Nerds and Beyond about feeling the pressure to create something worthy of its place in Batman canon, saying, "I wanted to make sure that I didn't let the fans down." Ultimately, he produced a suitably beastly vehicle that also conveyed the makeshift, DIY sensibility Matt Reeves was going for. But before he could get to work on fabricating the real car, he had to have some designs to work from.
That part was all up to designer Ash Thorpe. The illustrator and graphic designer was tasked with developing the look of the car prior to its construction and provided an insight into his process in a video breaking down the whole process. In "The Art of The Batman" book, Reeves said he wanted the Batmobile to "feel like a monster emerging from darkness." But when it came to working with Thorpe, the director actually provided a fairly open brief, highlighting some key words, such as "fear," "visceral," and powerful." Otherwise, it was pretty much up to Thorpe to design what he felt would work.
As the designer explains in his video, he used CGI to mock up some renders which he sent to Reeves for feedback. Interestingly, Thorpe had included a mockup that featured some elements that looked oddly similar to the Tumbler — the tank-inspired Batmobile design from the Dark Knight trilogy. The designs in question depict a car with an exposed front axle and giant tires on either end. One in particular features a pincer-like design on the axel itself, which is very reminiscent of the Tumbler's front end. And it seems these were all a little too Nolan-esque for Reeves' liking.
Reeves didn't want to redo the past
In the video explaining his design process, Ash Thorpe recounts how Matt Reeves immediately nixed his Tumbler-style design. He said:
"Matt and James [Chinlund, production designer] really didn't want to redo the past and didn't want to pay homage or get anywhere close to the brilliance of the Tumbler, which is an awesome design. So, that design was kind of ixnayed."
As Thorpe explains elsewhere in the video, these early mockups are really just a way for him to "get a touch point to see where Matt's head's at, where he's at with the project, what he feels connected to." These early ideas were really just the designer's attempt to gauge what Reeves was looking for, and the Tumbler-style Batmobile never really had a chance of being built. But it is kind of odd to see something similar to the Nolan-style Batmobile cropping up, even if it was in the early stages of production.
Reeves was clearly trying to establish a whole new Batman universe with "The Batman," so using even small elements that recalled earlier films feels like it would never have gotten past the director. Thorpe may not have intentionally borrowed from the Tumbler, but the moment I saw those designs in the video, before any mention of the Christopher Nolan films, I thought, "Oh, that's the Tumbler." Reeves and Chinlund clearly had the same response. Thankfully, the final design ended up being a wholly fresh take, and made for a show-stopping Batmobile chase that rivals anything Nolan did in his films.