Tobar said:

John Doom said:

DominicCobb said:

You do not have to stay true to the source. There's no rule that says that. There are plenty of films that have succeeded by not staying true to the source.

That's true: Tim Burton's Batman movies come to mind, in a way.

Burton's films were heavily inspired by the darker toned '80s Batman comics of the time.

I know: you can definitely see Miller's insipration down to the minutiae (Frankie must be a Corto Maltese fan, it seems :D)

But still, you get things like Bruce being portrayed as a psychopath, and Joker as the the one who murdered Bruce's parents. It was all done for a reason, though: to make a strong parallel between the protagonist and the antagonist, and it worked!