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

3. The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight Opening Scene Joker Heath Ledger
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 over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!