The BatmanSave

We open on Halloween night in Gotham. Mayor Don Mitchell Jr. is alone in his living room. Outside, an unseen voyeur watches through binoculars. The watcher follows him through the house. The mayor turns on a lamp. The watcher attacks. By morning, the mayor is bound to a chair, head crushed with a carpet-beater, an envelope marked 'TO THE BATMAN' resting on his chest. Detective Jim Gordon — played by Jeffrey Wright, the first Black actor in a major Batman film to play Gordon — calls in the masked vigilante personally. The Batman arrives. Bruce Wayne is barely a year into the persona, sleep-deprived, eyeliner under the cowl, eating dinner alone in Wayne Manor with his butler Alfred. He has never solved a real case.

The envelope contains a riddle: 'What does a liar do when he's dead?' Signed: a question-mark glyph. The killer calls himself the Riddler. Embedded in the mayor's body are clues to a much larger pattern — a network of Gotham institutional corruption that goes back decades. As Bruce works the case with Gordon, he notices a young woman observing the scene from outside the police line. He follows her to the Iceberg Lounge, a nightclub run by Oswald 'Penguin' Cobblepot. The woman is Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), a club waitress and part-time cat burglar looking for her missing roommate Annika.

The Riddler keeps killing. Each victim is a Gotham power-broker tied to a long-buried scandal — a federal informant called 'the Rat' who fed information about a 1970s mob bust to the FBI in exchange for protected status. Bruce and Gordon trace the killings back to a long-dead Wayne Foundation administrator named Edward Elliot and to a secret renewal-fund program tied to Bruce's late father Thomas Wayne. Annika is murdered before she can testify. Selina believes Falcone is responsible. Selina and Bruce, increasingly drawn to each other, work in parallel — sometimes at cross purposes.

They confirm the secret: Falcone himself was the FBI rat all along — using federal protection to systematically eliminate the rivals who would have replaced him. The Wayne Foundation renewal program was a corrupt slush fund his administrators secretly funneled through. Bruce's father, Thomas Wayne, knew. Thomas tried to pull out. He hired an investigative journalist named Edward Elliot to expose Falcone. Falcone had Elliot killed first. Days later, Thomas Wayne and his wife Martha were shot in Crime Alley. The mythologized origin story Bruce has built his entire identity around is, at best, contaminated by his father's complicity in cleaning up a murder.

Selina kills Falcone moments before Batman would have arrested him publicly. Riddler is captured shortly afterward in a quiet diner — sitting calmly, his planning complete. He is Edward Nashton, a forensic accountant for one of Gotham's renewal-fund-handling firms. His entire identity has been built around a public Twitter cult of followers who see the killings as righteous vengeance against the elite. Edward's masterwork is not the killings — it is what he set in motion next.

The climax takes place across the flooded Gotham Square Garden. The reformist Mayor-elect Bella Reál is on stage when the seawall blows. The Garden floods as the building collapses around its terrified attendees. Riddler's followers begin firing on the crowd. Bruce drops in alongside Selina; together with Gordon outside, they evacuate survivors through the rising waters. In the film's most-cited image, Batman lights a flare and leads survivors out of the flood — a deliberately humanizing rather than terrifying gesture. He has been the symbol of fear in Gotham. Riddler and his followers used Batman's example to justify their massacre. Bruce understands, finally, what his presence in this city has been doing to it.

The film closes on Bruce reframing his self-narration. He had spent two years projecting fear as the Batman, but Gotham's terror has multiplied because of his presence — Riddler and his followers were inspired by Batman's example. Bruce decides he must become something different. Not vengeance. Hope. Selina, choosing not to stay in a city she now understands is unsalvageable, rides her motorcycle out of Gotham. Bruce, on his own bike, watches her go from a junction and turns back into the city. The final shot is two motorcycle headlights moving in opposite directions.

The Batman grossed $772 million globally on a $200 million budget. Reeves's noir-soaked direction, Fraser's red-saturated cinematography, and Michael Giacchino's funereal score combined to produce the highest-rated Batman film of the 2020s. The film is the first chapter in Reeves's standalone Batman saga, separate from James Gunn's broader DCU continuity. The Batman: Part II is in production for a 2027 release.