Reinterpreting Batman villains for movies.

One of the things I really love about the character Batman is all of the wildly different takes on him, his city, and the other characters in that city. For most of them, there just aren't any definitive versions in my mind, and I find the different interpretations and portrayals to be fascinating.

One version I'm a huge fan of is Christopher Nolan's take on Gotham City and the characters in it. Nolan's Gotham City is certainly not the definitive Gotham. Batman in Nolan's movies is not the definitive Batman. The Joker in Nolan's movie is not the definitive Joker. But I love what the director has done with that world and those characters in his movies. I loved Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Christian Bale has been a great Bruce Wayne (and his Batman voice doesn't bother me at all), Heath Ledger was amazing as The Joker, and I think Gary Oldman as James Gordon is one of the best comic book movie casting decisions that has ever been made. The third movie in the series, The Dark Knight Rises, is one I'm very excited about. Unfortunately, it has been widely reported as the final Batman film made by Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale. Although Bale recently stated it was a possibility that he would come back for a fourth movie, it probably won't happen.

Ever since I saw Batman Begins, I've thought a lot about what existing Batman characters could fit into the Nolan's vision of Gotham City, and what kind of role they might play in a movie. It's a lot of fun to think about, especially with the villains. Obviously a lot of Batman's villains just wouldn't fit, and if you changed them to try to make them more realistic, trying to force a square peg in a round hole, you'd probably strip away everything that made the characters interesting in the first place. Everything that made you want to see them in a live-action movie. Other characters though, with some tweaking, could fit right in. I think characters like The Riddler, Hugo Strange, Black Mask, and Hush could each make good major villains in Nolan's Gotham City, and characters like Firefly, Penguin, and possibly even Ventriloquist and The Mad Hatter could be minor villains.

I also really like thinking about who could play these characters in movies if they were ever made. For some of those characters I listed above, I've thought of people who I think could be perfect to play them. I think of it as a fun creative exercise, and I thought it might be fun to share some of these thoughts on my blog, so I'll be making three posts this week about a few villains that I think would fit well in Nolan's Gotham City, with my thoughts about how the characters could be interpreted and adapted to fit in a Nolan movie, and my own suggestions for what actors could play them. I know that Christopher Nolan would have his own interpretations of these characters, were he to feature them in a new movie, and it's pretty much impossible to predict who he might cast, because his casting decisions have often been pretty surprising. These posts are just meant to be my own ideas, not predictions of who he would cast. And on Thursday, July 19th, the day before The Dark Knight Rises comes out, I'll be making a few more post that are a bit different, featuring what is sort of my own alternate interpretation of a character that Nolan has already featured in a Batman movie.