In summer 2008, as The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's sequel to 2005's Batman Begins, sent box office records toppling on its way to becoming the biggest film of the year, Hot Toys released the first of their licensed tie-in high-end 1/6th-scale action figures. For Batman Begins, Howard Chan's company, at that point still in the early stages of its Movie Masterpiece Series, had issued just one 1/6th-scale figure: MMS 13 Batman Begins – Batman, released in summer 2006, over a year after the movie's cinema debut. For The Dark Knight, the now firmly established and increasingly feted Hot Toys had over a dozen releases lined up, from figures based on Christian Bale/Bruce Wayne's new Batsuit and Heath Ledger's Joker to a 1/6th-scale Batmobile/Tumbler and Bat-Pod.
First out of the blocks, though, was a new take on the Batsuit from Batman Begins and the opening act of The Dark Knight: Hot Toys MMS 67 The Dark Knight (Original Costume).
As fine a figure as Hot Toys' 2006 take on the Batman Begins suit had been, certainly for the time, the revamped version was in a different league. Hot Toys' first attempt had featured an outfit comprising segmented rubber panels affixed to rubberised bodysuit, while the masked head sculpt, although nicely crafted and painted, wasn't as lifelike or evocative of a cowled Christian Bale as one might have wished. For The Dark Knight, the Begins Batsuit was realised as moulded, sculpted, matte rubber, more closely approximating the look of the adapted "Nomex survival suit" of the films, while the masked head sculpt was a remarkably realistic representation of Bale in a cowl.
By this juncture, Howard Chan's creative team had been bolstered by co-producer and lead painter JC Hong and sculptor Yulli, whose exceptional work could be seen not just in the cowled head sculpt of MMS 67, but in the unmasked head sculpt that came as part of the package. The year before, Hot Toys had released a military figure, USMC Three Infantry Battalions in Fallujah M29 Saw Gunner, which sported a head sculpt clearly inspired by Christian Bale, but MMS 67 was better still.
Hong and Yulli would achieve an even more accurate Bale likeness with the unmasked head sculpt of Hot Toys' take on the new, more flexible "hardened Kevlar plates over titanium-dipped tri-weave fibre" Batsuit unveiled in The Dark Knight, MMS 71, and produce yet more lifelike portraits of Heath Ledger's Joker – MMS 68, and especially the extraordinary MMS 79, alias the Bank Robber Joker, still one of Yulli's favourites – plus a fine attempt at Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent/Two-Face, MMS 81.
In the nearly two decades since their Dark Knight releases, Hot Toys have revisited and revamped all of those initial figures multiple times, not just in the Movie Masterpiece Series but as part of the Deluxe (DX) Series. But despite at least two further 1/6th-scale attempts on the Begins Batsuit, for my money MMS 67 remains the high-water mark. While the unmasked head sculpt has since been surpassed, the cowled sculpt stands as a fine piece of craftsmanship, so much so that Hot Toys have reused it several times. The Batsuit boasts a movie-accurate matte finish and shows no signs of deterioration even after nearly 20 years, and unlike subsequent Hot Toys takes on the Begins Batsuit, the accessories include the Pneumatic Mangler, used by Batman to apprehend Scarecrow in The Dark Knight.
For a Dark Knight Trilogy devotee like myself – I still vividly recall seeing Batman Begins on the big screen back in 2005 when I was working at Titan Books and we were releasing tie-in graphic novels and art books, and I got to write about all three films in my 2024/2025 book DC Cinematic Universe – MMS 67 The Dark Knight (Original Costume) stands as a figure to cherish: a fairly faithful 1/6th-scale recreation of the first Bale Batsuit, and a relatively scarce item to boot (unlike MMS 71 Batman The Dark Knight Version, which was distributed in the US and UK by Diamond, MMS 67 wasn't distributed in the West).
The Dark Knight may have been the biggest film of 2008, but that year also saw the release of another significant comic book movie, one that marked the start of not just a soon-to-be all-conquering cinematic universe, but an accompanying line of figures from Hot Toys...
