We Ranked the Best (and Worst) Actors to Play Batman

There's a great moment in the 2014 comedy Neighbours where an intoxicated Seth Rogen and Zac Efron are just sitting back, talking shop, and a natural topic comes up: the Caped Crusader.

"Who's Batman to you?" Rogen asks his co-star. "Are you kidding me?" Efron replies. The only option is Christian Bale in his mind. Rogen's character seemed to know this would be the answer, but just wanted confirmation. "Michael Keaton is Batman to me," he replies, before the two launch into their own Batman voice impressions of the two actors.

This conversation is one that's surely replicated often around the country. It could easily be argued that Batman is the closest thing the United States has to England's James Bond: an iconic character who will seemingly go on forever, passing from actor to actor.

With Thursday night's news that Robert Pattinson will be the latest to don the black mask and cape for the DC Extended Universe with Matt Reeves signed on to direct, now's as good an opportunity as ever to look back and rank our very favourites to portray Bruce Wayne on the big screen throughout the years. A quick caveat: we're only including major cinematic portrayals here, so things like Gotham, any animated series, and Robot Chicken need not apply.

Without further ado, to the Batcave!

Oh man. You love George Clooney. We love George Clooney. Everyone loves George Clooney.

But his single turn as the protector of Gotham in 1997's disastrous Batman & Robin was... not it. Clooney's Batman was a bad part of a worse movie – and the Academy Award-winner has always been self-aware enough to own it to this very day. Legend has it that if someone sees Clooney in the street and mentions Batman & Robin, he offers a ticket refund on the spot.

Adam West is the original Batman, but he never really captured the spirit of what made this character classic to so many people. The original series was essentially a sitcom. Still, West laid the groundwork for many of the more impressive portrayals on this list. Without West's original portrayal, there would've been nothing to build upon.

Val Kilmer's Batman is a weird case. In a lot of ways, he's the most forgotten Batman of the bunch – not as appallingly horrid as Clooney, not as memorable as some of the higher entries on the list, and in a movie that was the first post-Tim Burton entry of the '90s. Kilmer's Batman is fine, but it's a slippery slope when competing against the film's villains: Jim Carrey's totally off-the-wall Riddler or Tommy Lee Jones' outrageous take on Two-Face. Batman Forever was just weird, man. It's not really of any fault to Kilmer, but you kind of understand why all parties decided to reset after this.

Hear me out. The movies where Ben Affleck played Batman were not good. In fact, they were bad. But his performance had little to do with that. Affleck had a pretty convincing handle on the Bruce Wayne portion of things. The Batman was a little shakier, but still, not that bad. But "not that bad" is not the same as "good," and when the rest of the movie around "not that bad" is "absolutely horrible," well, that's not a winning recipe.

Sure, Will Arnett isn't himself donning the cape and mask, and sure, his Batman is interacting with other Legos rather than escaped inmates from the Arkham Asylum, but let's be real: This Batman rules. The movie's writers have clearly done their homework and figured out what makes the character both funny (namely, a total absence of self-awareness). Outside of Bojack Horseman, Batman is Arnett voice acting at its very best.

As Tim Burton's Batman and the first real portrayal of the character (sorry, Adam West) that we got on screen, Michael Keaton embodies the qualities that have always made a great Batman. He's daunting and looks good in the suit, but also has a Bruce Wayne charisma that stands out.

This role defined an era of Keaton's career. His familiarity with playing a superhero even helped prepare him for Birdman, which jump-started a later career renaissance for Keaton (which also included another superhero movie screen credit as the villain in Spider-Man: Far From Home).

Is the lead in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy actually...underrated?

As an actor, it's hard to argue that Christian Bale is underrated given his near-perennial success at the Oscars. But since so much of the attention in Nolan's trilogy tended to go to the villains (Heath Ledger's Joker, Tom Hardy's Bane), Bale's pitch-perfect Batman managed to somewhat fly under the radar.

Christian Bale's Batman is perfect. He plays Bruce Wayne with not quite same cockiness that Robert Downey Jr. uses to play Tony Stark (note: Bale first played Batman in in 2005; Downey Jr.'s first Iron Man appearance came in 2008), but with a level of rich guy swagger that no other Bruce Wayne portrayal has managed to touch.

There's also the fact that Bale simply had perfect chemistry with just about everyone he came into contact with in the films, whether it was one of the aforementioned villains, Michael Caine's Alfred, anyone. It's probably a testament to Bale's Academy-Award pedigree, but he can really make a scene electric with just about any acting partner, and Christopher Nolan figured to be the perfect director to take advantage of that.

Bale was only 31 when Batman Begins came out, so he'll maintain the distinction of the youngest Batman—Robert Pattinson will be 35 when The Batman hits theatres in 2021—but you'd imagine it would be a great bit of research if the Welsh actor and his English quasi-successor could put a lunch or two on the calendar to chat about how to make the character as great as possible.