The BatmanSave

The film opens on Halloween night in Gotham City, observed through the binoculars of an unseen voyeur. The watcher is staking out the home of Mayor Don Mitchell Jr., who is deep into an election against an upstart reform candidate named Bella Reál. Mitchell is alone with his television. The watcher enters the apartment. He kills Mitchell with a carpet beater, wraps tape around his face, and leaves a sealed envelope addressed to "the Batman." Across the city, Bruce Wayne — in his second year as Gotham's masked vigilante — narrates his nightly patrol via a journal voiceover. He has not yet found the symbolic role he wants to play in Gotham. He fights street-level crime alongside police lieutenant James Gordon, who tolerates him; the rest of the GCPD detests him.

Gordon brings Batman to the crime scene against the protests of his commissioner. The envelope contains a greeting card and a riddle — "What does a liar do when he's dead?" The killer signs himself the Riddler, drawn in a question-mark glyph. Embedded in Mitchell's body are the first clues to a much larger conspiracy: the Riddler has been planning a series of public murders, each targeting Gotham's most corrupt institutional figures. Each victim will receive his own personalized riddle from Batman to solve. The investigation pulls Bruce into an underground criminal world he had not previously paid attention to: the elite organized crime hierarchy that has controlled Gotham's politics for decades, headed by aging mafia don Carmine Falcone and his lieutenant the Penguin (Oz Cobblepot).

At Mitchell's residence, Bruce notices a young woman observing the scene from outside the police line. He follows her to the Iceberg Lounge — Penguin's nightclub front for the wider drug-trafficking operation. The woman is Selina Kyle, a club waitress and part-time cat burglar, looking for her missing roommate Annika. Annika worked at the Iceberg Lounge with Selina and the late Mayor's mistress. Selina has been planning to rob Penguin's drug supply. Bruce intervenes during her break-in and the two reach an uneasy alliance: he wants information on Annika and Mitchell, she wants help retrieving her friend. The Riddler's next victim is Commissioner Pete Savage, found dead in a city gymnasium with rats sealed in a bag over his head.

Batman and Gordon trace the Riddler's clues through Gotham's institutional rot. Annika, eventually located, is murdered before she can testify; Selina believes Falcone is responsible. The trail leads to a long-dead Wayne Foundation administrator named Edward Elliot and to a secret renewal program — the Gotham Renewal Fund — that Bruce's late father Thomas Wayne had publicly championed before his death. The Riddler's third victim is the city's district attorney, Gil Colson, killed live on television in a public bombing rigged to a numerical riddle. As Batman investigates, the question Riddler keeps asking surfaces: where is the rat in plain sight? The rat is a longtime informant inside the Gotham mob who fed information to the FBI in exchange for protection. The rat had been a Wayne Foundation collaborator. Bruce's own father, it slowly emerges, may have been entangled in Gotham's corruption — though the truth turns out to be more complicated.

Selina, also seeking the rat, kills Falcone's longtime accountant. Gordon and Bruce investigate Falcone's record more directly. They confirm that Falcone himself was the FBI rat all along — using federal protection to systematically eliminate the rivals who would have replaced him. The Wayne Foundation's reform money, instead of helping Gotham's poor, was being skimmed by Falcone's apparatus. Thomas Wayne had asked the wrong fixer (Falcone) to stop the press from running a story about his wife Martha's mental health history; Falcone had then murdered the journalist. Bruce's parents had been killed not by random street crime but by complications from this corrupt arrangement — the Riddler is convinced of this, though Alfred and the film leave the original murders ambiguously presented as a different sort of tragedy.

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 in fact Edward Nashton, a forensic accountant for one of Gotham's renewal-fund-handling firms, and his entire identity has been built around an obsession with reform. He confesses everything to Batman in his Arkham State Hospital cell. He has prepared a final phase that has already been triggered: bombs throughout the city's seawall, designed to flood Gotham's lowest neighborhoods, while a small army of his online followers (in green-painted Riddler masks) wait inside Gotham Square Garden to assassinate Mayor-elect Bella Reál during a public address.

The film's climax takes place across the flooded Gotham Square Garden. Reál is on stage when the seawall blows. The Garden floods as the building collapses around its terrified attendees. The Riddler followers begin firing on the crowd. Bruce drops in alongside Selina; together with Gordon outside, they neutralize the gunmen one by one. Bruce is electrocuted by exposed wires in the rising water; Selina pulls him out. He uses an emergency chemical injection — an adrenaline cocktail he had prepared as a last-resort drug — to revive himself. The film's final sequence is one of cinema's quietest victories: Bruce, illuminated by an emergency flare, leads survivors through chest-high water out of the flooded stadium. The traumatized civilians who had previously feared Gotham's vigilante now follow him toward safety.

The film closes on Bruce reframing his self-narration. He has 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, but hope. He visits the broken city's hospital lines and tells survivors he is there to help. Selina, now wanted, tries to convince him to leave Gotham with her; he refuses. She rides off on her motorcycle. The closing shot of Bruce on horseback through the wreckage, illuminated by red emergency flares, suggests a city beginning the long process of reconstruction. In the post-credits-style closing of Edward in his Arkham cell, he meets a fellow inmate (an unidentified, scarred prisoner played by Barry Keoghan) who laughs in a familiar register — Riddler now has a friend, setting up a future Joker for the planned The Batman Part II.

The Batman grossed $772 million globally on a $200 million budget. Director Matt Reeves and cinematographer Greig Fraser shot the film in deep red and black, drawing visual references from David Fincher's Zodiac, Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View, and the Gothic urban photography of the 1970s. Composer Michael Giacchino's score introduced a Bach-inspired Batman motif that became one of the year's most-discussed musical themes. Pattinson's Bruce Wayne was widely praised as the most internalized take on the character since Christian Bale's, and the film's noir-detective register — focused more on investigation than spectacle — established it as a definitive standalone Elseworlds Batman entry. The Batman Part II is currently in development for a planned 2027 release.