It’s been twenty years since Batman Begins showed us that not all superhero movies have to be unrealistic, bright and colourful CGI-heavy films with bad one-liners. Christopher Nolan’s dark and gritty 2005 reboot, which followed Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin, changed the comic book film genre and made Christian Bale’s deep-voiced, growly Batman the blueprint for all brooding vigilantes that followed. But what if Bruce Wayne had been played by someone else? Speaking at Fan Expo Dallas 2025, Orlando Bloom, the 48-year-old Pirates of the Caribbean and The Lord of the Rings star, casually revealed that he was in early talks to play Batman in the Dark Knight Trilogy.
“I did sit down with Christopher Nolan on Batman. And, umm, yeah, I know guys. I know. And I do sometimes think, and I wonder if I had really pursued that and done the screen test or whatever I would have had to do to, if that would have gone my way? But, umm, but it was… I mean look, Christian Bale. He destroyed that,” said Bloom to a crowd of surprised listeners at Fan Expo Dallas 2025, sounding like someone still not over the missed opportunity.
He’s not wrong. Bale did crush it. But hearing his confession, you can’t help but wonder what a Bloom Batman would’ve looked like in the Nolanverse. Would Gotham have been protected by a kinder, gentler vigilante?
This wasn’t the first time Bloom aired his Bat-regret either. Back in 2019 at San Diego Comic-Con, he told MTV News that he did meet with Nolan during casting but didn’t audition because he was already tangled up in other franchises. “I did meet with Christopher Nolan, But I didn’t audition, and it was more of a conversation of … I was in the midst of all this other stuff, and I was like, ‘I can’t,’ I love Christopher Nolan so much, I’d run, not walk, to work with him,” he said.
To be fair, at the time, Nolan wasn’t yet the prestige filmmaker behind Inception, Dunkirk, or Oppenheimer. He was that guy who made Memento and was about to reboot Batman, a character who didn’t have the best record with film adaptations. Bloom’s schedule was full of cursed Aztec gold and Mordor road trips, so it’s understandable. But still, it’s a missed opportunity that clearly still weighs on him.
In 2013, Bloom’s name popped up again, this time in rumours that he might take on the cowl for Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel sequel. That role eventually went to Ben Affleck, another actor who fans doubted until he put on the suit and proved everyone wrong in Batman v Superman.
Now, with James Gunn reshaping the entire DC cinematic universe with the rebooted DCU, fans are asking who the next Batman could be. We’ve got new castings for Supergirl, Lobo, a few Green Lanterns and Hawkgirl. But no new DCU Batman yet, even though the character was teased in Creature Commandos.
Could Orlando still suit up at 48? Probably not. Especially not next to a much younger Superman (Corenswet is 31 years old).
Gunn recently teased that Superman’s next chapter may not be a straight-up sequel, but possibly a Batman team-up. “What I’m working on is in some way…I mean, yes, yes, yes, yes. But is it a straight-up Superman sequel? I would not say necessarily,” the co-chairman and co-chief executive officer of DC Studios recently told EW.com.
Could Bloom show up in the DCU as an older vigilante, maybe a grizzled member of the World’s Finest from a different multiverse? That’s not completely off the table. So maybe the Batman door isn’t fully closed for Orlando Bloom just yet.
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