After the studio rejected a Batman origin story reboot Joss Whedon pitched in December 2002, Warner Bros. hired Nolan in January 2003 to direct a new film.

Aiming for a darker, more realistic tone compared to the previous films, a primary goal for their vision was to engage the audience's emotional investment in both the Batman and Bruce Wayne identities of the lead character.

Receiving a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, the film elevated Bale to leading man status while it made Nolan a high-profile director.

After confronting Falcone, who says real power comes from being feared, Bruce spends the next seven years traveling the world, training in combat, and immersing himself in the criminal underworld.

Intent on fighting crime, Bruce returns to Gotham and takes an interest in his family's company, Wayne Enterprises, which is being taken public by businessman William Earle.

Company archivist Lucius Fox, a friend of Bruce's father, allows him access to prototype defense technologies, including a protective bodysuit and the Tumbler, an armored vehicle.

Bruce poses publicly as a shallow playboy while setting up a base in the caves beneath Wayne Manor and taking up the vigilante identity of "Batman," inspired by his childhood fear, which he has now conquered.

Having stolen a powerful microwave emitter from Wayne Enterprises, he plans to vaporize Gotham's water supply, rendering Crane's drug airborne and causing mass hysteria that will destroy the city.

Other cast members include Mark Boone Junior as Arnold Flass, Gordon's corrupt partner; Linus Roache as Thomas Wayne, Bruce's late father; Larry Holden as district attorney Carl Finch; Colin McFarlane as Gillian B. Loeb, the police commissioner; Christine Adams as Jessica, William Earle's secretary; Vincent Wong as an old Asian prisoner; Sara Stewart as Martha Wayne, Bruce's late mother; Richard Brake as Joe Chill, the Waynes' killer; Gerard Murphy as the corrupt High Court Judge Faden; Charles Edwards as a Wayne Enterprises executive; Tim Booth as Victor Zsasz; Rade Šerbedžija as a homeless man, who is the last person to meet Bruce when he leaves Gotham City, and the first civilian to see Batman, Risteárd Cooper and Andrew Pleavin as uniformed policemen, Jo Martin as a police prison official, and Shane Rimmer and Jeremy Theobald (the star and co-producer of Nolan's 1998 film Following) as Gotham Water Board technicians.

Actors John Foo, Joey Ansah, Spencer Wilding, Dave Legeno, Khan Bonfils, Mark Strange, Grant Guirey, Rodney Ryan and Dean Alexandrou portray members of the League of Shadows.

In January 2003, Warner Bros. hired Memento director Christopher Nolan to direct an untitled Batman film,[43] and David S. Goyer signed on to write the script two months later.

[7] Also similar to Superman, Nolan wanted an all-star supporting cast for Batman Begins to lend a more epic feel and credibility to the story.

[5] His personal "jumping off point" of inspiration was "The Man Who Falls", a short story by Denny O'Neil and Dick Giordano about Bruce's travels throughout the world.

[5] In seeking inspiration from Superman and other blockbuster films of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Nolan based most of the production in England, specifically Shepperton Studios.

Production designer Nathan Crowley installed twelve pumps to create a waterfall with 12,000 imperial gallons (55,000 L; 14,000 US gal), and built rocks using molds of real caves.

Zimmer enlisted a boy soprano to help reflect the music in some of the film's scenes where tragic memories of Bruce Wayne's parents are involved.

Following the scale model creation, a crew of over 30 people, including Crowley and engineers Chris Culvert and Annie Smith, carved a full-size replica of the Tumbler out of a large block of Styrofoam in two months.

Costume designer Lindy Hemming and her crew worked on the Batsuit at an FX workshop codenamed "Cape Town", a secured compound located at Shepperton Studios in London.

Many attributed the slump to be a result of high ticket prices, marketing costs, DVD sales hitting record levels, and new technologies creating an incipient demand for movies delivered directly via the Internet, over-the-airwaves, satellite dish or cable set-top box.

[85] Batman Begins ranked at the top in its opening weekend, accumulating $48 million, which was seen as "strong but unimpressive by today's instantaneous blockbuster standards".

The site's critical consensus reads, "Brooding and dark, but also exciting and smart, Batman Begins is a film that understands the essence of one of the definitive superheroes.

[93] According to Total Film, Nolan manages to create such strong characters and story that the third-act action sequences cannot compare to "the frisson of two people talking", and Katie Holmes and Christian Bale's romantic subplot has a spark "refreshingly free of Peter Parker/Mary Jane-style whining".

[94] Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan, who felt the film began slowly, stated that the "story, psychology and reality, not special effects", assisted the darkness behind Batman's arsenal; he noted that Neeson and Holmes, unlike Bale's ability to "feel his role in his bones", do not appear to fit their respective characters in "being both comic-book archetypes and real people".

[98] In contrast, J. R. Jones, from the Chicago Reader, criticized the script, and Nolan and David Goyer for not living up to the "hype about exploring Batman's damaged psyche".

Giving it four out of four stars, he commended the realistic portrayals of the Batman arsenal – the Batsuit, Batcave, Tumbler, and the Batsignal – as well as the focus on "the story and character" with less stress on "high-tech action".

[100] Like Berardinelli, USA Today's Mike Clark thought Bale performed the role of Batman as well as he did Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, but that the relationship between Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes was "frustratingly underdeveloped".

[101] Kyle Smith thought Bale exhibited "both the menace and the wit he showed in his brilliant turn in American Psycho", and that the film works so well because of the realism, stating, "Batman starts stripping away each layer of Gotham crime only to discover a sicker and more monstrous evil beneath, his rancid city simultaneously invokes early '90s New York, when criminals frolicked to the tune of five murders a day; Serpico New York, when cops were for sale; and today, when psychos seek to kill us all at once rather than one by one.

[109][110][111] On the film's 10th anniversary, Forbes published an article describing its lasting influence: "Reboot became part of our modern vocabulary, and superhero origin stories became increasingly en vogue for the genre.

"[112] Shawn Adler of MTV stated Batman Begins heralded a trend of darker genre films, that either retold back-stories or rebooted them altogether.

"[140] Blogger Mark Fisher states that Bruce's search for justice requires him to learn from a proper father figure, with Thomas Wayne and Ra's al Ghul being the two counterpoints.