One Of The Batman Crew's Biggest Challenges Was Building A Fully-Functional Batmobile

In "The Batman," filmmaker Matt Reeves introduced a whole new take on the Batmobile after the iconic car had been through multiple on-screen iterations. Prior to Reeves' 2022 film, Christopher Nolan introduced us all to a Batmobile envisioned as a former military vehicle that one bewildered Gotham cop famously referred to as a "tank." A similarly bulky design found its way into the Zack Snyder movies. Reeves, however, decided to pare things down for his effort, and introduced a version of the Batmobile that had, like its hero's suit, been cobbled together from various parts to make a Frankenstein-like muscle car from your nightmares.

Reeves has spoken about wanting the Batmobile in "The Batman" to look like something out of a David Lynch movie, and said in an interview for James Field's book, "The Art of The Batman," that the point of the car was, "to intimidate, to create terror." The director made no secret of his horror influences for "The Batman" — the whole movie, after all, is basically "Se7en" but with the Caped Crusader. Reeves' extended that aesthetic beyond borrowing story points from classics of the genre, however, and said that it was important that his version of the Batmobile "feel like a monster emerging from darkness," which eventually made for a memorable scene where Colin Farrell's Oz is confronted by the car during a rain-swept drug deal gone wrong. In that sequence, the Batmobile emerges monstrously from the darkness, its animalistic revs sounding like growls from some cosmically horrifying beast.

Crafting this horror-inspired take on the Batmobile proved to be somewhat of a challenge for the production team.

The beastly Batmobile of "The Batman" is essentially a muscle car that Robert Pattinson's Bruce Wayne has modded to suit his crime-fighting needs. In that sense, while it's designed to intimidate and appear monstrous on-screen, the car also has a very practical basis. Designer Ash Thorpe has written about the look of the car, which aside from trying to embody key words he got from Reeves, such as "fear," was inspired by real-world designs including "the iconic Porsche 917" due to it being "such a raw machine with one intention."

But making Thorpe's final design a reality proved more difficult than production designer James Chinlund had anticipated. Speaking to Nerds & Beyond in May 2022, he explained how working on such a big film in general gave him "anxiety," adding, "it was just a lot of pressure — mostly from a place of love and respect. I just have so much love for the material that I wanted to make sure that I didn't let the fans down."

But it wasn't just that Chinlund was working on such a beloved franchise that made things hard. The production designer was tasked with making a fully working version of the Batmobile — a car that Matt Reeves had envisioned as an almost otherworldly embodiment of fear and intimidation. As Chinlund put it:

"One of the things I'm most proud of in the film is that the car actually performs. So not only do we have to design a car that was exciting and sort of hit all the notes on the narrative, but it had to actually do all these stunts. I think that's one of the greatest achievements."

Making the Batmobile from "The Batman" was an extensive process that involved fabricating every element of the car using multiple methods from 3D printing to casting in aluminium. The front of the car had to be reinforced to allow it to barrel through other vehicles during the show-stopping chase between Batman and The Penguin, making the vehicle, in Matt Reeves' words, like a "battering ram." Elsewhere, the production team fitted a big block LS3 engine, which sat at the front of the Batmobile and was surrounded by intakes that opened and closed. This created an effect that James Chinlund likened to gills, which gave the car a living, breathing aspect, even though a lot of work went into making the car feel like a real, practical machine.

All of this culminated in a truly original take on the Batmobile that managed to combine Reeves' vision of a living embodiment of fear with a practical, working vehicle. Other Batman movies have, of course, used working models for their Batmobiles, but the complete, ground-up fabrication of the version from Reeves' film stands as a particularly impressive feat in the history of the Dark Knight.