What City Was Used For Gotham In The Batman?
Gotham City is and always has been Batman's favored stomping grounds. The city itself has gone through several different iterations as well, depending on who is currently running DC Comics' Dark Knight and what the situation calls for. The bright and campy "Batman" series from the late 1960s was filmed at different locations in the Golden State of California like Pasadena, Los Angeles's Griffith Park, and film studios in Century City and Culver City (via IMDb). Tim Burton's dark and highly stylized Gotham in "Batman Returns" was filmed almost entirely at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, taking up all seven soundstages (via Movie-Locations.com). Christopher Nolan's grounded and realistic vision of Gotham required something a bit more tangible, and "The Dark Knight Rises" was filmed at several locations in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the iconic football stadium scene taking place at Heinz Field (via The Take).
With Matt Reeves' latest version of Gotham acting as a playground for Robert Pattinson's take on the iconic "world's greatest detective" in "The Batman," Gotham required something different than had been seen in previous iterations, but which city served as the backdrop for the famous fictional metropolis?
Multiple cities were used in the creation of Gotham in The Batman
To create this new Gotham, Matt Reeves required not one city, but several, including Liverpool and London in England; Chicago, Illinois; and Glasgow, Scotland, with production designer James Chinlund saying, "The idea [was] that in the 1920s and [']30s, there was this incredible boom. So we wanted this base layer of crumbling, decaying ornament. And at various points in Gotham's history, the idea was that there were these attempts at revival and renewal" (via BBC).
St. George's Hall in Liverpool, England, is used as Gotham City Hall; Hartwood Psychiatric Hospital in Scotland is used as Gotham Orphanage; the Waterloo Monument in Liverpool serves as Gotham Square; the Necropolis Cemetery in Glasglow, Scotland, is used during the scene with Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) and Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz); Two Temple Place in London is used as Mayor Mitchell's (Rupert Penry-Jones) house; and streets in Chicago, Illinois, serve as a motorway for Batman and Catwoman's fancy motorcycles (via IMDb). Producer Dylan Clark added, "Obviously the architecture is incredible here. But it's also the crew. The people [who] work in the film industry from the UK, they're just top tier" (via BBC). Ultimately, it seems that the role of Gotham could not be fulfilled by one city — or even one country — but the efforts of the production team have created something different yet strangely familiar.