10 Best Opening Movie Scenes Of All Time (According To Reddit)

3. The Dark Knight

Heath Ledger Joker The Dark Knight bank heist opening
Warner Bros. Pictures

The sequence that makes us all do that "Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV" meme as we try and guess which window will smash, The Dark Knight's bank heist opening is gripping from the very first frame, to the very last.

Trailing a group of robbers as they unwittingly succumb to the Joker's deadly game, the sequence works as a killer action set-piece in its own right (with that expansive IMAX frame lending the whole thing a grand scale), while also serving as our introduction to Heath Ledger's psychotic clown, and his ongoing feud with the mob.

Cue a series of shocking deaths, intense shootouts, and some twisted humour, with one of the greatest villain reveals in movie history. Seriously, who doesn't get chills when Ledger pulls off his mask and utters that chilling line, while Hans Zimmer's score ramps to an electric crescendo?

The Dark Knight kicked off a Christopher Nolan trend, wherein the director would open his movies with a huge, relatively standalone action sequence, often dubbed a prologue. The Dark Knight Rises and Tenet have mirrored this technique in the years since, but The Dark Knight's has yet to be topped.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.