Being Batman is expensive
Want to dress up like a rodent and battle the criminal underworld? You’d better have deep pockets. According to estimates, the total cost of Batman's outfit, weapons, gadgets, vehicles, and training would be more than half a billion dollars - $682,450,750, to be exact. That’s obviously a huge amount of money, but the cost of fighting crime is just a drop in the bucket for billionaire Bruce Wayne, whom real-world economists have estimated has a fictional net worth somewhere between $6.5 billion and$11.6 billion.
Batman didn't always let the bad guys live
In all of the Batman movies, the Caped Crusader adheres to a strict “no killing” policy. It has something to do with his parents being brutally murdered in front of his eyes. Sure, the Batman might throw a criminal off a roof from time to time or beat them up really, really badly, but broken bones, internal bleeding, and a lifetime of rehabilitation are about the worst things the Dark Knight is willing to dish out.
The same is mostly true of Batman’s comic book counterpart, but in his early days, the crime fighting character had no compunctions about straight up killing dudes and even packed a gun! Golden-age Batman beat, shot, stabbed, crushed, and exploded crooks from all walks of life. He once even hung an out-of-control mental patient to death from the Batplane, quipping, “He’s probably better off this way!” What a jerk!
The Joker had a moustache?
While the clown prince of crime has never officially sported any facial hair, the actor who portrayed him on the 1960s “Batman” television series always had a moustache. Cesar Romero, who was known for his trademark facial hair, refused to shave his mustache for the role of The Joker. Though it was never very obvious on standard definition tube TVs, Romero’s moustache is easy to spot under his clown makeup in still photos and the 1966 movie.
Batman was nearly played by... Bill Murray?!
Batman is a role that actor Michael Keaton will forever be associated with. Keaton, who at the time of 1989’s “Batman,” was best known for his comedic work, was a very unlikely choice to play the role of Bruce Wayne/Batman. He even beat out seemingly obvious candidates like Alec Baldwin and Mel Gibson.
However, a few years prior there was an even more unlikely choice: Bill Murray. In the mid-1980s, Warner Bros. was planning to reboot Batman with a movie in the same vein as the campy 1960s TV show starring Adam West. That plan ultimately fell through, but the studio’s top choice for Bruce Wayne at the time was none other than “Saturday Night Live” vet and “Ghostbusters” star Bill Murray. “I would have been a fine Batman,” Murray told MTV in 2008. “You know, there have been a number of Batmen. I like them … I thought Mike Keaton did a great job as Batman. It’s obviously… it’s a great role.”
And Two-Face was nearly played by... Lando Calrissian
"Star Wars" actor Billy Dee Williams appears in Tim Burton’s 1989 “Batman” movie as Gotham City District Attorney Harvey Dent - a character that any Bat-fan knows goes on to become the insane and disfigured criminal mastermind Two-Face. Dent only has a few minutes of screentime in the film, but the real reason Williams took the role was so that he could play Two-Face in a future Bat-movie.
The actor even had a pay-or-play contract, which required Warner Bros. to buy Williams out when they decided to recast the role with Tommy Lee Jones for 1995’s “Batman Forever.” The role was most recently played by Aaron Eckhart in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight.”
There have been five official Robins (and countless others in one-off appearances and alternate universes)
When someone mentions Batman’s teenage sidekick Robin, the name Dick Grayson is usually what springs to mind. Bruce Wayne’s young ward was played by actor Burt Ward in the 1960s “Batman” TV series and by Chris O’Donnell in “Batman Forever” (1995) and “Batman & Robin” (1997). But on the comic book page, Dick Grayson isn’t the only teen to take up the Robin mantle.
Bruce Wayne has a long history of training children to become costumed vigilantes. There have been five Robins all told: Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, and Damian Wayne (Bruce’s son with Talia al Ghul). While Grayson and Drake went on to successful superhero careers of their own (as Nightwing and Red Robin), two other Robins have died in the line of duty (Todd and Wayne), and another has been retroactively written out of the official continuity (Brown). Basically there are probably some pretty serious child endangerment and gross negligence charges coming Batman’s way.
Marlon Wayans neary beat Chris O'Donnell for the role of Robin
Speaking of Robins, Chris O’Donnell wasn’t the first choice to play the role in the 1990s. Marlon Wayans (of “Scary Movie” and “White Chicks” fame) was actually hired to play the role of Batman’s sidekick in 1992’s “Batman Returns.” However, the character was ultimately written out of the film because there was already too much going om tje script.
Despite not being in the movie, Wayans was still paid and was contracted to play Robin in Burton’s third Batman movie. However, Wayans was replaced by O’Donnell when Burton left the project and director Joel Schumacher took over.
Even George Clooney hated “Batman & Robin”
There’s no question that 1997’s “Batman & Robin” derailed the franchise and set back the comic book movie by nearly a decade. The film’s star George Clooney knows this and, for the most part, takes responsibility for it.
“With hindsight it’s easy to look back at this and go ‘Whoa, that was really sh-- and I was really bad in it,’” Clooney said in a 2011 interview. “But if I am going to be Batman in the film ‘Batman & Robin,’ I can’t say it didn’t work and then not take some of the blame for that.”
To this day Clooney’s real issue with the film remains the extra features on his costume. “I wasn't thrilled with the nipples on the batsuit,”the actor confessed in a 2014 Reddit AMA. “You know that's not something you really think about when you're putting it on. You figure all batsuits have nipples and then you realize yours was really the first. Batman was just constantly cold I guess.”
Armie Hammer was cast as the “Justice League” Batman
Before he played the Winklevoss twins in “The Social Network” or the Lone Ranger in the disastrous Disney Western of the same name, actor Armie Hammer nabbed the role of Bruce Wayne/Batman in the ill-fated 2007 project “Justice League: Mortal.” Hammer would have played a younger version of the Dark Knight, fighting alongside equally young versions of other DC Comics heroes like Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and The Flash. Ultimately, however, George Miller’s-big budget superhero team up never happened due to ballooning budget and a writer’s strike.
Christian Bale wasn’t a shoo-in for “Batman Begins”
Bale ended up portraying Batman in three films: “Batman Begins” (2005), “The Dark Knight” (2008), and “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012). But getting the gig in the first place wasn’t easy for Bale. For Christopher Nolan’s 2005 reboot “Batman Begins,” eight actors auditioned for the part of Batman/Bruce Wayne: Bale, Joshua Jackson, Hugh Dancy, Billy Crudup, Cillian Murphy, Henry Cavill, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Eion Bailey. The video audition required each actor to don Val Kilmer’s Batsuit from “Batman Forever” and play a scene from the reboot. The role eventually went to Bale, but Nolan liked Murphy’s performance so much that he cast the Irish actor as villain Dr. Jonathan Crane, also known as The Scarecrow.-yahoo
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