Christopher and Jonathan Nolan went into their interpretation of the Batman mythos with a vision. Yet for all of its visionary greatness, there was one monologue written for Batman Begins that was so good, yet so out of place with the film, it could have only been featured in a teaser trailer.
IGN picked up on a Reddit thread that's been circulating the internet, in which Jonathan Nolan commented on a random post containing the teaser trailer for Batman Begins. Unprompted, he revealed this little tidbit about the now famous dialogue that gave the world its first taste of the then new Batman:
I wrote this in a couple hours in my brother’s trailer while he was shooting the scene in which Bruce is arrested for stealing Wayne corp supplies on his 'journey.' Remains some of my favorite writing from these films. Was written specifically for the trailer. Wouldn’t have worked in the film.
For reference, here's the original Batman Begins teaser trailer, from 2004:
To be fair, Jonathan Nolan's assessment of why this Batman Begins monologue was used specifically for the trailer makes sense. Batman and Bruce Wayne are identified primarily as a character who is obsessed with avenging the death of his parents. If you're interested in creating a by the numbers, and possibly mediocre Batman film, you can very easily follow that formula. However, that's not what Batman is all about, especially in the Nolan films.
The tone of the monologue, while sounding very much like a stereotypical Batman monologue, wouldn't exactly fit in the Christopher Nolan's original film for one big reason: Bruce Wayne never intended to be Batman forever. While this point was highlighted more in The Dark Knight, Batman Begins does end with the hint of Bruce quitting his crime fighting ways when he feels Gotham is safe enough. That right there shows that the vigilante that "will not stop until it gets its revenge" in the trailer is different than the character we saw in the final film.
Sometimes there's that one line or one scene that you wish could work in the final product. The teaser trailer monologue to Batman Begins sounds like one of those moments that Jonathan Nolan would have loved to put on the big screen. If he were working on a Batman film closer to the works of Frank Miller's run with the character, then maybe Nolan would have been able to keep that line, and even dirty it up a little more. In the meantime, Batman Begins still more than works without that sequence, and it holds up as the bedrock to the entire Dark Knight Trilogy.
Batman Begins is currently available on DVD, Blu Ray, Digital HD, and for the time being – Netflix.
