Absolute Batman is a reboot that understands why reboots fail

Almost every Batman reboot changes the surface. New cowl, new city, new tone, darker or funnier, a different Robin, a different way of arriving at the same origin. Absolute Batman changed the bank account, and it turns out that was the only variable that ever mattered.

Bruce Wayne is not rich. That is the premise. He grew up in the Narrows, his father died and left no fortune behind him, and the man who becomes Batman is an engineer with a job.

Every other piece of the character reorganizes itself around it. The gadgets have to be built rather than ordered, so they are heavy and ugly and there are fewer of them. There is no cave and no satellite and no fleet. What he can plausibly do collapses down to what one very determined person with a workshop can make, and the stories get better immediately, because the answer to a problem can no longer be a purchase.

It also quietly fixes the thing about Batman that has been getting harder to read for about fifteen years, which is that a man with unlimited money going out at night to hit poor people is not a fantasy that has aged gracefully.

Because the surface is the part people can see, so the surface is the part that gets changed. New suit, new grit, new color grade.

But the surface is downstream. If the resources are the same, the story shapes are the same, and all you have made is a new coat of paint on a building that has not moved.

Snyder and Dragotta went one level under and pulled out a load-bearing wall, then rebuilt the whole thing to stand up without it. That is what a reboot is supposed to be, and it is why hardly anybody does it. You have to be willing to lose something the audience already likes.