Batman Begins is a Prequel

Does anyone remember back when the casual audience thought Batman Begins was gonna be a Prequel to Batman89?  Even after the film had been out for awhile I remember people at my local video rental store still referring to it as one.

I don't think you even theoretically could do a Prequel to Batman 89, it wasn't an origin film as we think of it today but it was still presented as very early in Batman's career, it's heavily implied everything he did before it started was just more of what we saw in the cold open.  Gordon clearly didn't even think the Batman was real till the Axis Chemicals incident, so for that reason alone you couldn't do a Year One kind of story.

But you see all things considered, Batman Begins definitely is a Prequel, it's a Prequel to The Dark Knight.

I'm not just saying that because of how much TDK became a bigger film, I'm not gonna go around calling A New Hope a prequel to Empire Strikes Back.  There are only three Star Wars Prequels, and then two glorified Easter Egg Hunts.

You see it starts with how The Dark Knight doesn't seem like a sequel, there is no reason you need to have seen Begins before watching it, not even much of a reason why it would help to have seen Begins, it doesn't actually draw on the prior film's events at all.  People make fun of how the 90s Batman films didn't seem all that concerned with continuity, but the references to Vickie Vale in Batman Returns are more of a reference to the prior film then anything in TDK.  It helped for marketing that a lot of these actors were already popular in those roles, but that's it.

And the reason people thought Begins was a Prequel originally is because it was made like one, even it's title is a Prequel title.  It was like Gotham and Smallville in that it functioned as a vague prequel to a basic lore but not a specific already existing continuity.

Remember this was the first time non-comic readers had seen a not yet Commissioner version of Jim Gordon, now everyone takes it for granted that Gordon starts out as an ordinary cop, but he used to just mainly be Batman's M.

So when looking back at the Nolan Bat-Films now, Begins is a Prequel to The Dark Knight far more then The Dark Knight is a sequel to Begins.