Originally Posted by LoathsomePete

Yes and no. I can appreciate Christopher Nolan's take on the subject matter and the fact that he was able to prove you can make intelligent movies about superheroes but I'm not 100% onboard with the mentality that you need to go the dark and gritty route to do it. In someways the Nolan triology has prolonged the misconception started in 1986 with Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns that Batman was always dark and gritty and Miller was just resetting the status quo.

When it comes to the two Burton Batman movies and the two Schumacher movies I can't help but see they're more or less the same beasts, just with different aesthetic designs, but both have the same basic flaws in all of them. The focus on stunt casting big name actors as the villains was a problem throughout all four movies and some basic story structure problems were all issues that didn't really come up as much with the Nolan movies, so I think that's why those three are so often regarded as the best of them all.