If it worked for Christopher Reeve’s Man of Steel, it would work for Christian Bale’s iteration of the Dark Knight.
Christoper Nolan told this story recently during a Q&A session held during an IMAX 70mm screening of the Dark Knight trilogy (via THR), which concluded seven years ago with The Dark Knight Rises.
The director wanted to give Batman Begins the weight of “event cinema” so that it wouldn’t be dismissed like many superhero movies had before, and while ultimately Bruce Wayne would have to put on the Batsuit, Nolan successfully used Superman: The Movie to back up his choice to have it happen later.
Although the superhero movie genre had started to become popular in the late ’90s and early 2000s with offerings like Blade and X-Men, when Nolan boarded Batman Begins, the landscape was definitely a lot different than how it looks now.