' They're not too bothered that I'm certainly no caped crusader in my suit and tie. As for my passenger, Mark Perkins, the owner of the vehicle, he's not much of a Robin, either. People are only interested in the car as we drive through his home town of Ascot in Berkshire.
The Batmobile used by actor Adam West in the original TV series of Batman has sold for $4.2m (£2.6m) at a US auction. The car was bought by Rick Champagne, a logistics company owner from Phoenix, Arizona. The 56-year-old, who was just 10 when the high-camp TV series began in 1966, said it "was a dream come true".
So, Ford agreed to sell the prototype to him for a buck, and Barris immediately got to work. Barris, with a skinny $15-30,000 budget, gathered his top metal fabricator, Bill Cushenberry, and turned the auto-show car into the Batmobile in a mere three weeks.
After many years on display at Gatlinburg's Guinness World Records Museum, The 1966 Barris TV Show Batmobile has moved a couple of blocks and is now part of the Hollywood Star Cars Collection.
Jack Nicholson was the highest-paid actor for a single movie for his role as Joker in 1989's Batman, earning around $90 million. Nicholson's contract included a $6 million upfront payment and a percentage of the final box office gross and profits from Joker-related merchandise.
The Batmobile was built upon a Chevrolet Impala chasis with a Chevy V8 engine, and was based on and modified from a 1970 Corvette body when previous development with a Jaguar and Ford Mustang failed.
This is a street-legal replica of the Batmobile used in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy. It costs $1 million, which is around £600k in real money, and is therefore more expensive than a pair of Lamborghini Aventadors.
Good news, Batman lovers! A fully functional Batmobile replica exists — and you can even drive it outside of Gotham City. Led by architect and artist Nguyen Dac Chung, the Vietnam-based Macro Studios used blueprints from Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy to faithfully recreate the movie's Tumbler vehicle.
Driven by the legendary Adam West and lightyears ahead of its 1940s counterparts, the 1966 Batmobile was based on the 1955 Lincoln Futura concept car. The car was owned and customized by renowned designer George Barris, who'd bought it from Ford for a dollar. In 2013, it was auctioned off for $4.62 million.
(There are even more detailed in published accounts, dating back to 1939 when Batman made his first comic book appearance.) But for purists, there is only one true Batmobile. The rest are just imitations of the original. What we have come to recognize in popular culture as the Batmobile was built in 1966.
The custom-built Batman Tumbler is an actual working vehicle. The prototype took approximately one year to manufacture, but the ones that followed had a quicker turn-around. During filming, the Tumbler actually performed on the streets, making jumps and reaching 90 MPH for the action-adventure movies.
The Batmobile's boost thrusters can push its speed to 350 miles per hour for a short duration. A new Batmobile model, the Bat-Bolt, is introduced in the story, surpassing the speed capabilities of the regular Batmobile.
Almost 20 feet in length, the Batmobile driven by Michael Keaton in the 1989 and 1992 movies was based upon a 1967 Chevy Impala found in a London junkyard. It was powered by a 327-cubic inch V-8 Chevrolet engine mounted low in the frame in order to maintain a low hood line and enhance the car's sleek profile.
While it seems unlikely that Bale will ever return to the role, he remains the current highest-earning Batman actor, surpassing even his two successors in the role. Whether the British actor will ever be unseated remains to be seen, but for now, he remains the most profitable Batman ever put to screen.
How much did Jim Carrey get paid for Batman Forever?
He got a cool $5 million for the role, and you can certainly make the case that casting Jim Carrey as the questioning villain made Batman Forever into an event all by itself.
Morgan Freeman famously appeared as Lucius Fox in Christopher Nolan's Christian Bale-fronted Batman trilogy: 2005's Batman Begins, 2008's The Dark Knight and 2012's The Dark Knight Rises. It has been reported that Freeman was paid $5 million for each of the three films, totaling $15 million when all was said and done.
The show's producers contracted George Barris to provide the Koach. Barris paid show car designer Tom Daniel $200 to design the car, and had it built at Barris Kustoms, first by Tex Smith, but finished by Dick Dean, his shop foreman at the time.
The Batmobile has license plates! The one most commonly seen read "2F-3567," on a black "Gotham 1966" plate. The registration number has no discernable meaning. (Although, some fans have pointed out that as a hex color code, #2F3567 is a sort of Batman blue.)
Oh yes – You read that headline correctly. There's actually a street-legal Batmobile in existence. It only took two years, about a million dollars and one seriously psyched superfan to achieve. And like the real Batmobile, it's often zooming down the road to help those in need.
