9 Origin Movies That Actually Worked

2. Batman Begins

Thanks to Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher's movies, you could be forgiven for thinking that we'd already seen Batman's origin enough. But the reality is that those films merely took the one recognisable element - the murder of his parents - and fetishised it into a fixation.

It didn't so much inform the character as much as haunt him, which is a subtle but incredibly important difference. Batman Begins, on the other hand, really pulled at the threads to explore the psychology of Batman's beginning as well as the very physical reality of it.

Thanks to Christopher Nolan's stripped-down approach and a compelling performance by Christian Bale, we got much more of an insight into the character. And for the first time, we got to see the decisions behind Batman's constructed mythology (other than "bats are a bit creepy"), meaning not only was Begins a great story, it was also a welcome supplement to the rest of the franchise.