Robert Pattinson

Robert Pattinson has been part of a major franchise that really put him on the fame map. And now he has another going playing one of the most iconic superheroes to ever grace the comic book pages.

If it feels like Robert Pattinson has been in and around Hollywood, brooding and pale, for as long as we can remember, well it makes a lot of sense. The dude has had as prolific an early career as it gets and even managed to not be defined by a teen heartthrob role that easily could have been fans’ lasting impressions. 

He first came on the scene in 2005 playing the ill-fated Cedric Diggory in the Harry Potter franchise with the fourth movie, The Goblet of Fire. It was there that he ended up in the Tri-Wizard tournament alongside Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter only to get iced by Voldemort before it was all said and done. 

But the role proved to be the launching pad for what would come next when he landed the role of Edward Cullen in the Twilight saga alongside Kristen Stewart. The Edward Cullen character was seemingly impossibly good-looking, broody, and pretty and a massive teenage crush for years and years. 

Though the movies never faired all that well critically, they definitely had the fanbase going and Robert Pattinson was a major reason why. In many ways, it seemed as if he’d been born to play this part from the look the angst-y pallor. 

There ended up being five Twilight movies in total over the course of four years (2008-2012) totaling about $3.6 billion dollars at the box office worldwide when it was all said and done. Though his in and off-screen romance with Kristen Stewart was a much-ballyhooed piece of pop culture news at the time, the two eventually went their separate ways when the franchise came to a close in 2013.

After the Twilight saga, Robert Pattinson seemed to be on a cinematic mission to distance himself from the Edward Cullen character, taking a number of smaller roles in independent movies. In general, this was a smart career move, showing off his significant acting chops while not tying himself to another franchise.

He had a smaller role in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet in 2020, but it proved to be one of the bigger budget affairs he was involved with before things really stepped back up in 2022.

That was when he took on the role of Bruce Wayne/ Vengeance in Matt Reeves’s The Batman. It was a dark (read: very dark) interpretation of the character on the big screen and Robert Pattinson was nearly perfect in the role.

He was borderline crazy himself in the role of the Caped Crusader and offered a whole new look at the psyche of the character we really had seen in any live-action form.

The Batman was a smash hit and has spawned a franchise in and of itself with a sequel coming and a number of other plans around side characters like Zoe Kravitz’s Catwoman and Colin Farrell’s Penguin.