Christopher Nolan's Batman movies are not just one of the most expensive movie trilogies ever made, but also one of the greatest. Taking the iconic superhero and grounding him in a heightened reality after the high camp of the Joel Schumacher era, the director delivered three highly-influential and epic blockbusters that grossed billions at the box office. Its easy to forget that Batman Begins was a huge risk at the time; coming less than a decade after Batman & Robin had effectively killed the franchise, Warner Bros. handed $150m to a young director that had never made a blockbuster before to deliver a grounded origin story that doesn't even feature the title character in costume until almost an hour into the movie. While Batman Begins would gross a solid-if-unspectacular $374.2m at the box office, the movie inadvertently became the yardstick by which all reboots were measured, with numerous productions referring to it as a direct influence. Three years later, The Dark Knight surprised many by scoring the highest domestic opening weekend of all time on its way to becoming the biggest movie of 2008, showered with praise as quite possibly the best comic book movie ever made, boosted by the late Heath Ledger's instantly-iconic turn as the Joker. $230m trilogy-closer The Dark Knight Rises came burdened with impossibly high expectations, but still managed to deliver a satisfying final chapter in amongst all the plot holes. Unfortunately for Zack Snyder, any future movies featuring the Caped Crusader will inevitably be compared to Christopher Nolan's incredibly popular, and very expensive, Dark Knight trilogy.
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