Over the weekend, there was a Walmart ad featuring a bunch of famous movie cars. It included a joke where an employee asked if the new gun-murder Batmobile even had a trunk. This is actually an important question.
If you think back to all of Batman canon, have you ever seen the superhero take a gadget out of the trunk?
I don’t think so! In most of the more recent iterations of the iconic loosely animal-themed vehicles, like in the Christopher Nolan Batmans and in Batman V Superman, there’s no indication of a trunk and plenty of indication that there isn’t a trunk.
We’ve touched on this in the past, like when my colleague Jason outlined the perfect Batmobile, which is basically an armored ambulance.
In the “Tumbler” Batmobile from the Dark Knight trilogy, the only indication of any rear storage are the explosive mines that are deployed from the rear in the Batman Begins police chase. That’s not exactly a trunk. The rest of the space is seemingly taken up by the jet engine used for sick jumps.
In Batman V Superman, Batman murders a bunch of goons with a harpoon gun that fires out of the back, which is also next to a jet engine, so there’s no indication there’s any room left back there for a trunk, either. Not even in the walkaround video.
In this blueprint of the Batmobile from 1989’s Batman, it’s pretty clear that the car is really just a cabin mounted on top of what’s essentially one long jet engine unit. There’s almost no chance of any room left for storage space.
None of these Batmobiles have much storage, if any. It’s surprising, considering one of the biggest traits of the Batman superhero is the numerous gadgets at his disposal for seemingly any and every situation. If he doesn’t have a trunk, where the hell do all of the gadgets go when he’s on the move?
That’s not even the biggest inherent flaw with the Batmobile not having a trunk, though. To me, the lack of a traditional trunk calls into question Batman’s ability to transport goons.
Sure, most of the time Batman is known for tying up his goons at the scene of the crime and leaving them for Commissioner Gordon to clean up later. But sometimes, Batman drops them off directly to the police station, like we see in The Dark Knight, or strings them up in a more-obvious location for easier discovery. How the hell does he move a body if he has nowhere to put them in his car?
The only time in the movies we’ve ever seen someone else in the Batmobile with Batman is in Batman Begins, where he rushes a drugged Rachel Dawes back to the Batcave for treatment. I think it’s fair to assume he wouldn’t have thrown his love interest in the trunk even if he had the option, but I also think it’s enough to cite as evidence that there’s a second seat in the Batmobile for a reason.
Does this mean we have to assume Batman has to awkwardly transport his tied up captives in his passenger seat? What are the alternatives?
Does he park the Batmobile and somehow swing through the rooftops of Gotham with a criminal slung over his shoulder? Or dies he just drag them behind the Batmobile? That doesn’t really seem to be a very Batman thing to do—at least before he did it in Batman V Superman.
Batman has practical needs just like the rest of us. In fact, his needs for gadget, weapon and goon storage likely exceeds what me or you usually require from our personal vehicle’s cargo space. It’s time for the Batman canon to reflect this. It’s time for Batman to get something a little more practical.
It’s time we saw a Bat-trunk.