BatmanSave

The film opens in Gotham City, a stylized retro-futuristic metropolis where art-deco architecture, hand-cranked elevators, and steam-belching industrial alleys coexist with corrupt municipal politics. A small family is mugged at gunpoint in a back alley. Two of the mugger duo are climbing a building rooftop with their stolen wallet when they are confronted by a winged, cape-trailing figure in dark armor who tosses one of them off the roof and dangles the second over the edge. Batman (Michael Keaton) tells the surviving mugger to spread word about him before vanishing into the night. The Batman-as-urban-legend rumor has been quietly circulating among Gotham's criminal underworld for months but has not yet been confirmed by any reputable source.

Two parallel investigations are introduced. Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), a Pulitzer-winning photojournalist, has come to Gotham specifically to investigate the Batman rumors, partnering with Daily Globe reporter Alexander Knox (Robert Wuhl) to confirm the figure's existence. District Attorney Harvey Dent (Billy Dee Williams), commissioner Jim Gordon (Pat Hingle), and Mayor Borg (Lee Wallace) are publicly committing to the prosecution of crime boss Carl Grissom (Jack Palance), whose mob organization has effectively ruled Gotham's criminal underworld for two decades. Grissom's lieutenant and second-in-command is Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson), a violent enforcer with a notorious history of psychological instability and an even more notorious affair with Grissom's wife.

Grissom, suspicious of Napier's affair, sets up his lieutenant by sending him on a raid of the Axis Chemicals factory specifically tipped off to Gordon's police force in advance. Napier and his crew arrive at Axis Chemicals expecting routine document-recovery and find themselves ambushed by police. Batman intervenes during the firefight. In the chaos, Napier shoots one of his own men, fires a ricochet bullet that grazes his own face, and tumbles from a catwalk into a vat of toxic chemicals when Batman drops him. The fall would have been survivable; the chemical immersion is not. Police divers cannot recover his body. Napier, presumed dead, swims out through a runoff pipe into Gotham harbor and emerges chemically transformed: white skin, green hair, a permanent rictus grin from facial-tissue damage, and a profoundly worsened psychological condition.

Bruce Wayne's introduction is delayed until after Napier's transformation. Vicki Vale meets him at a Wayne Manor charity dinner where Bruce, distracted and socially awkward, fails to identify himself as the host until embarrassingly far into a conversation. Vicki's romantic-investigative interest develops. Bruce, simultaneously, recognizes Vicki as a uniquely capable potential confidante. He brings her closer despite his usual paranoia, eventually revealing the existence of the Batcave to her in the film's third act in a sequence that simultaneously confirms her instinct as a journalist and complicates her trust as a potential romantic partner. Bruce's parents' deaths are referenced through flashbacks but not yet shown in detail.

Napier emerges as the Joker, declares himself the rightful boss of Grissom's organization, and personally murders Grissom in a darkly-comic confrontation. The Joker's mission across the rest of the film is to terrorize Gotham City through a series of increasingly elaborate public attacks: he poisons consumer products by lacing them with a chemical agent (Smylex) that kills victims with a permanent grinning rictus, mirroring his own face; he hijacks a Gotham television broadcast to deliver theatrical taunts to the populace; he leads a cosmetic-and-perfume-themed assault on the Gotham Museum of Art, defacing classic paintings with spray-paint while the Prince song 'Partyman' plays through portable speakers. The museum sequence introduces Vicki to the Joker for the first time when she is invited there as bait by Bruce's manipulated invitation.

Bruce and Vicki's romance complicates as the Joker's pursuit of her intensifies. The Joker reveals himself to Bruce in Vicki's apartment, asks Bruce if he has ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight, and shoots him at point-blank range. Bruce survives because he has been wearing protective armor under his shirt; the moment also reactivates his repressed memories of his parents' deaths, and the film delivers its key revelation: Jack Napier, decades earlier as a young street thug, was the masked gunman who murdered Thomas and Martha Wayne in the alley outside the Monarch Theater. The Joker's existence is traced directly back to the moment that created Batman. Their conflict is not coincidental; it is the resolution of a thirty-year-old fated meeting.

The Joker's climactic public spectacle is the Gotham bicentennial parade, a city-wide celebration where he plans to release Smylex gas through enormous parade-balloons floating above the assembled crowds. Batman, having identified the threat, attacks the parade in the Batwing aircraft, severing the balloon-tethers and lifting the entire poisonous payload up into harmless dispersal in the upper atmosphere. The Joker, unmasked and enraged, opens fire on the Batwing with an unfeasibly long pistol that he produces from his coat. He shoots down the Batwing. Batman survives the crash and pursues the Joker on foot through Gotham Cathedral, the city's tallest gothic structure, in the film's final extended action sequence.

The cathedral confrontation moves vertically through the bell-tower as the Joker takes Vicki Vale hostage and climbs to the highest possible elevation. Batman engages the Joker in hand-to-hand combat across the bell platform. The Joker attempts to escape via helicopter ladder lowered by his henchmen. Batman wraps a heavy gargoyle-sculpture chain around the Joker's ankle, anchoring him to the cathedral's stonework. The helicopter pulls away, the Joker dangles briefly, and the chain's weight overcomes his strength. He falls multiple stories to his death on the pavement below. The Joker's lifeless body lies on the cathedral steps with a battery-powered laughing-tape recorder inside his jacket pocket, eerily continuing to laugh until the police shut it off.

The film's epilogue establishes the new status quo. Commissioner Gordon unveils the Bat-Signal, a giant searchlight on the Gotham police headquarters roof modified to project the Batman silhouette into the night sky. Gotham's mayor and DA publicly endorse Batman as a sanctioned partner in fighting organized crime. Vicki Vale, fully aware of Bruce's secret identity, reunites with him in front of Wayne Manor as Batman silhouetted on a rooftop above watches the city. The film closes on the Bat-Signal projecting into the cloudy Gotham sky. Batman grossed $411 million globally on a $35 million budget, an unprecedented commercial performance that proved superhero films could be event blockbusters and led directly to the genre boom that would dominate Hollywood across the following four decades. Tim Burton returned for the 1992 sequel Batman Returns; the franchise continued through Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997) before being rebooted by Christopher Nolan in 2005.

Anton Furst's production design, which won the 1990 Academy Award for Best Art Direction, established the gothic-industrial Gotham aesthetic that has informed nearly every subsequent Batman adaptation across animation, video games, and live-action. Danny Elfman's symphonic score, with its instantly-recognizable five-note Batman theme, became one of the most-used superhero leitmotifs in subsequent licensed material; The Animated Series of 1992 carried over both the Furst design language and the Elfman score wholesale. Prince's full original soundtrack album for the film, released as a separate commercial product alongside the Elfman score, reached number one on the Billboard 200 and produced the hit single 'Batdance.' Michael Keaton's casting, which had been protested vigorously by long-time comic fans before release, was retroactively recognized as one of the great superhero-casting decisions, and Keaton reprised the role in 2023's The Flash.