The Batman swoops into top box office spot, becomes second-biggest pandemic debut
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Gotham's newest Caped Crusader has swooped into the domestic box office with a vengeance.
Matt Reeves' The Batman debuted at No. 1 with a valiant $128.5 million across 4,417 locations in North America this weekend, becoming the highest-grossing film released in 2022 thus far and the second-biggest pandemic-era debut, according to Comscore. Spider-Man: No Way Home remains the first, crossing the $100 million mark with a total of $253 million in one weekend following its December release.
Robert Pattinson dons the famed Batsuit as Bruce Wayne/Batman in Reeves' adaptation, investigating the murder of key political figures by the elusive Riddler (Paul Dano). When his sadistic serial killer foe leaves behind a trail of clues that begin to lead closer to home, Batman must forge new relationships to unmask a murderer and put a stop to corruption in Gotham.
Zoë Kravitz stars as Selina Kyle/Catwoman in the film, which also features Jeffrey Wright, Colin Farrell, Andy Serkis, and Peter Sarsgaard, among others. In her B review, EW's Leah Greenblatt contends that Pattinson "may be the Darkest Knight yet," likening the neo-noir iteration to films like Blade and The Crow.
Jonathan Olley/DC Comics/Warner Bros. Robert Pattinson and Zoë Kravitz in 'The Batman'
"He journals, he broods, he plucks a single blueberry from a silver urn and gazes at it mournfully. For nearly three hours he gives great mood — and while that is not quite the same thing as a great movie, writer-director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) nearly wills it to be in his sprawling, operatic update," Greenblatt writes.
"Kravitz is feline and fiercely lovely, a girl with her own private pain and motivations; Dano feints and giggles, a simpering loon," Greenblatt continues, adding, "But it falls on Pattinson's leather-cased Batman to be the hero we need, or deserve. With his doleful kohl-smudged eyes and trapezoidal jawline, he's more like a tragic prince from Shakespeare; a lost soul bent like a bat out of hell on saving everyone but himself."
Reeves previously shared his vision for the adaptation with EW during Pattinson and Kravitz's digital cover for the film: "I felt that it was important to examine this idea of him being an emblem of vengeance," he said. "Is that really the right approach to all of this? [I wanted] to have the movie take you on a journey where you start having one point of view about what he's doing and then have that challenged in such a way so that you knew by the end, he would have an awakening and he himself would have some change that he'd have to undergo."
Batman, of course, couldn't topple Tom Holland's position in the top five this weekend. Holland's Uncharted and No Way Home came in at No. 2 and No. 4 in the domestic box office, bringing in an additional $11 million and $4.4 million by Sunday, respectively. (No Way Home's North American gross total now stands at $786.4 million.) Channing Tatum's Dog came in third, bringing in an additional $6 million by the end of the weekend.
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