Car casting in movies is very hit or miss, if you’ll please excuse the pun. Sometimes the choice of car is perfect for the role, like the E34 BMW M5 in Ronin, and sometimes even James Bond struggles to find the right car, like his 1987 Lincoln Mark VII LSC in License To Kill.Bruce Wayne, however, has always managed to get the right car.
The latest dark, confusing blockbuster with a handful of redeeming qualities from the DC Comics cinematic universe is currently filming in London. Spoiler warning from here on.
This one is supposed to be about the character The Flash, but for some reason, Bruce Wayne was spotted on set, too,played by actor Michael Keaton reprising the role he had in 1989 and 1992. (If you don’t know, Bruce Wayne is the Batman).
The latest movie the Flash was in, Justice League, had Batman and Bruce Wayne played by Ben Affleck. I’m guessing this new movie will have something to do with multiverses or time travel to explain the difference, which I am now a little annoyed by all of the time travel plotlines in movies nowadays. You can’t change the past, screenwriters! Get over it, people.
Regardless of plot, the movie gets right what pretty much every Batman movie gets right, and that’s casting the perfect car for the billionaire Bruce Wayne.
In this latest case, it’s aMaybach concept car from 2017. It is sufficiently grandiose, over 18 feet long and powered by an electric powertrain with four motors totaling an output of 550 kilowatts, or 738 horsepower, Mercedes claims. A few years ago, it debuted as a red coupe with gullwing doors and was followed by a convertible version painted navy blue. It looks like the model on set is not a convertible, but took the blue paint job.
The only part about Bruce Wayne driving this car that I don’t like is that it has already featured in a Drake video. Once Drake beats you to something, let it go.
Regardless, inside, the concept car featured elm wood floorboards, white tufted leather seating, a little strip of dashboard touchscreen and some fancy heads-up display-like windshield projection. It’s a car perfectly fit for Gotham’s crime-fighting fake playboy inside and out, and it joins a cast of great Wayne family rides.
I previously wrote about how Justice League put Bruce Wayne in an Aston Martin DB Mk. III, which is the same car Ian Fleming had James Bond drive in his spy novel, Goldfinger. (By the time they made the movie out of the book, Aston was building the DB5, which is why it was cast.) It makes a lot of sense that two aristocratic paramilitary quasi-detectives would have the same taste in cars.
The Maybach is indeed much higher class and fittingly more dramatic and visually exaggerated than the Lamborghini Murciélago LP 640 and Aventador that Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne drove in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, but Lamborghini is still very on-brand for someone trying to hold up a playboy image.
The Maybach is much more in the luxury class of what Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is more accustomed to, given his previous movies. Wayne is chauffeured around by his butler, Alfred, in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith from the 1950s in Batman 1989 and Batman Returns.
It’s not common for Americans to do the chauffeured drive outside of an Uber or Lyft these days, but the Maybach retains a lot of the status, and length, of the limousine Wayne is used to, even if he now sadly leaves Alfred at home.
Leave a Reply
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
