Bryan Singer and his 2000 X-Men was a big hit at the box office and contributed in a big way to studios being willing to give superhero movies another look. Sam Raimi’s Spiderman would follow in 2002 (both movies spawned superior sequels, and blew it bad with the third films). But it was Christopher Nolan’s 2005 Batman Begins where not only the attitude toward superhero and comic book movies changed, but the approach to general tentpole movie-making as well.

See, Batman Begins was rather audacious: Batman had been portrayed to rather middling success, character-wise, at best from Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman to the worst in Joel Schumacher’s 1997 Batman and Robin. For years after the BaR debacle, Warner attempted to do a slew of Batman movies (Schumacher even wanted, as an apology to Bat-fans, to do an adaptation of Frank Miller’s seminal comic Batman: Year One), before settling on Nolan and David S. Goyer’s pitch of pretending the previous films had not happened. They would do something that had never been satisfactorily portrayed onscreen: how exactly Bruce Wayne became Batman.

Now, sure, Burton’s Batman provided a few flashbacks, but I, being old enough to have seen Burton’s Batman in theaters, always felt left a little cold by the films. I’m not a fan of having to divulge every bit of back-story for every character in every film, but Batman IS his fucking back-story. That’s what makes the character the character. Wayne’s past defines him, and his quest to make peace with that is something ameliorated by going out every night and pummeling criminals and keeping the city of Gotham safe and secure and a fine city. Neither pair of Burton or Schumacher films came close to really giving a shit about Wayne, or Batman, really, for the stars of those films were always the villains (hell, Nicholson and Schwarzenegger were first billed).

Nolan’s Batman Begins delves into Bruce Wayne. It shows the before and after of the moment that changed his life: the murder of his parents right before his eyes. It shows how he came to choose being costumed as a bat. Even the ears on the Bat-suit get a reasonable description. See, everything gets a REASON. Every choice Bruce Wayne makes towards that moment of pulling Falcone out of the limo and snarling in the Batvoice, ‘I’m Batman,’ is given its just due by having a perfectly logical reason and path to that moment.

Most importantly, Nolan treated all this with a heightened realism (this was even displayed in the sparse utilizing of CGI for effects, where Nolan wants everything done in camera, and resorts to CGI only when he must), and makes the viewer completely understand that if you were this small boy who saw his parents murdered by some creep with slick-backed hair, you might grow up to be a caped crusader, too. This realism even carries over into how Nolan never makes being Batman look cool. Peter Parker has a ball as Spiderman, and Superman never really brooded over anything until Zack Synder’s 2013 Man of Steel (of which Nolan had a hand in). But Nolan’s Batman? He’s a bruised and battered mess who we actually see complaining about a lack of sleep due to his need to live two lives.

After a near-perfect first hour, Batman Begins settles into a linear summer action movie, complete with a race-the-clock climax and vanquishing of the villain. Pretty standard stuff, yet there was indelible intelligence behind Batman Begins. Despite this being Nolan’s first big foray into big-budget film-making, he does an admirable job, even if the fight scenes are staged much as many fight and action scenes were during the 2000s: close shots, quick cuts, rendering the scene almost unintelligible, though this was vanquished for a much more streamlined approach to the filming of action scenes in ’08’s The Dark Knight and ’12’s The Dark Knight Rises.

What Batman Begins did though, for better or worse, was cast a wide influence upon comic book movies and movies in general. Spider-man was rebooted with the Amazing Spider-man series, which saw more back-story added to Peter Parker’s family. Marvel dug deeper into its vault to create its own studio and its own film universe, with movies planned to release through 2028. This includes every major Avengers character getting their own origin movie, and two Hulk movies in six years. There’s been two Superman movies in seven years, both with different casts and crews, both done to restart the moribund franchise. Man of Steel is to lead into a Batman vs. Superman film, followed by a potential Justice League (DC’s version of the Avengers) movie. The Fantastic Four is to be rebooted (and rightfully so). X-Men Origins: Wolverine was to be another franchise starter, with other X-Men characters getting their own where’d-they-come-from films (X-Men: First Class was originally to be a Magneto origin story). Hell, there’s even discussions of Star Wars characters such as Boba Fett and Han Solo getting their own films.

Whether this glut of comic book movies is a good thing, well that is up for debate. For me the sheer volume of them has rendered the spectacle and wonder of seeing a man fly, or a man dressed as a bat fighting crime, almost moot. I realize I’m alone in that regard; most audiences are reveling in the embarrassment of riches with regards to superhero movies declaring it to be a golden age. But I feel some of the magic is gone when reboots every few years allow studios to basically say, “Oops, fuck it, here’s another.”

I suppose it is almost a curse of success that those following you want to emulate what made your efforts work. Christopher Nolan gave way to comic book filmmakers feeling that imbuing their films and their supercharacters with grit and dark themes would automatically lead to the connection with fans that Nolan’s films enjoyed. But that isn’t how it works, at least not for me. All I see is every superhero movie made recently living in the shadow of Batman’s, and Christopher Nolan’s, cape. They don’t seem to want to venture beyond shadows and grit. Batman is Batman and Superman is Superman. They have different stories and different themes and I don’t feel that anyone is served by making everyone act like Master Wayne.

It’s at a point now where the bold move would be to let a little sunshine and brightness into Metropolis.