Batman is a character that has gone through a great deal of change through his decades of existence. However, the character's presence in film has always been pretty much the same. One movie director recently wondered out loud why every Batman that we see in the movies has to be dressed in all black. Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts would love to see a different classic look on screen, the blue cape/cowl and the grey bodysuit that has been part of the comics for decades. The director wants to know...
Why are we afraid of a good Blue-Grey Ba[t]man costume on film?
It's a perfectly reasonable question that is entirely worth asking. The blue-grey combination has been a fairly consistent part of Batman's look for decades. While the comic book version of the character has shifted between different combinations of blue, grey, and black, over the years, and has been including black more consistently in recent years, the blue and grey have never gone away entirely. However, since Michael Keaton made Batman a major part of the feature film world, every iteration of that costume that we have seen has been pretty much black. The only exception has been the Batman & Robin version worn by George Clooney, where the suit was a dark blue, but everything else was still black.
While we don't know for certain what the answer to Jordan Vogt-Roberts Twitter question really is, there are a couple of points that stand out. One is that, Joel Schumacher movies notwithstanding, the cinematic Batman has always been designed in a world where pretty much everything around the character is also black. The character is supposed to blend in, in order to leap from the shadows to stop the bad guys, so wearing anything other than black simply wouldn't work. Additionally, you have the issue that the blue and grey costume may still have some negative connotations attached to it because its most famous use was probably during a version of the character the films do not want to remind people of, the 1960s TV show.
We're certainly in for an all-black Batman the next time we see him on screen, in November's Justice League, though the door will always be open for a shift at some point. The Batman of the DC comic universe has changed his look now and then, there's no reason the movie universe version can't do the same.
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