10 Greatest Opening Shots From Recent Movies
These movies grabbed your attention from their very first shot.
The opening shot of any movie is so, so important - it needs to grab the viewer's attention from the outset and ensure they're immediately intrigued for what follows.
Nobody wants to kick their movie off with a bland establishing shot devoid of visual personality - every filmmaker wants to make a blistering impact from that initial image, because of course first impressions account for so much.
A truly great opening shot will stick in the viewer's mind forever more, perhaps even becoming the image they think of when remembering the movie as a whole.
That's perhaps the case with these 10 films, all of which offered up incredible opening images sure to bury their way into your mind forever more.
From expectation-defying shots to technically astonishing ones, exceedingly clever uses of framing and movement to surprise audiences, and everything in-between, these shots had it all.
More than anything, though, each helped perfectly set the mood for what was to come, while assuring viewers they were in the hands of highly skilled filmmakers with all the tools necessary to deliver a cinematic experience they wouldn't soon forget...
10. The Batman
While it's absolutely typical for a Batman movie to open with a scene that introduces the primary villain, Matt Reeves' The Batman veered away from the spectacular set-pieces that kicked off Christopher Nolan's latter two Batman movies for something considerably simpler and more horrific.
The very first shot of the film is an instant attention-getter, despite its lack of technical showiness: it's nothing more than a then-unknown individual spying on an apartment through a pair of binoculars.
We see the person watching a young boy dressed up for Halloween and pretend-killing a man we assume to be his father, and who of course turns out to be Gotham City mayor Don Mitchell Jr. (Rupert Penry-Jones).
The person whose eyes we're seeing through then looks up to the apartment's skylight, and after almost two minutes we finally cut to inside the apartment.
The subsequent moments reveal that we've been following the perspective of The Riddler (Paul Dano), who goes on to murder Mitchell in one of the most brutal showings of force in any superhero movie.
Reeves had the confidence in his vision to linger on this long, unbroken shot of the Riddler going about his work. How many $200 million movies can you name that dared open in such refreshingly pared down, yet still entirely artful, fashion?