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Did a Batman Comic Book Inspire the Movie Speed?

Written by on June 12, 2023

Welcome to the 900th installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. This time, our second legend is about whether a Batman comic book story co-written by future movie producer, Michael Uslan, helped to inspire the hit action film, Speed.

You would be surprised to see just how often the strangest thing can inspire an idea that will turn into a blockbuster. And I’m not talking about stuff like the case of the movie that literally just adapted a comic book story from a Judge Dredd Annual without crediting the creators of the comic (something I wrote about in one of my earliest Comic Book Legends Revealeds). but situations like reading a comic book or a novel and it suddenly inspires an idea that is then extrapolated into a movie idea.

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Thus, it is not that crazy when my buddy, Mordechai, asked me whether the hit action film, Speed, was inspired by a Batman comic book story in an issue of Detective Comics that was written by Bob Rozakis and Michael Uslan (Uslan, of course, would go on to become a successful film producer, most famous for being the guy who got Batman back to the big screen with 1989’s Tim Burton adaptation of the Dark Knight). I don’t believe it is the case, but it is fun to look into it!

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What happened in the Batman comic book story?

In 1976’s Detective Comics #460 (written by Bob Rozakis and Michael Uslan, with art by Ernie Chan, back when he was still going by Ernie Chua, and Frank McLaughlin), the lead feature saw Commissioner Jim Gordon driving home when he is alerted over his radio that there is a bomb in his car, and if he drops under 50 miles per hour, it will explode (and it will also explode if he unbuckles his seat belt)…

Batman’s trusted butler, Alred Pennyworth, was luckily monitoring GCPD radio traffic, so he let Batman know about it, and the two quickly zoom into action, with Alfred having to take control of the Batmobile after Batman drives alongside Gordon on the highway (it’s a good bit where Gordon, naturally, is wondering who the heck is driving the Batmobile)…

Chan’s Batmobile design is pretty cool looking, right? Very sleek. Seems more like a 1980s design than a 1976 one.

In any event, Batman then jumps on to Gordon’s car, and finds the bomb attached to the speedometer…

Batman jumps on to Gordon's car to save the day

The Dark Knight successfully gets the bomb off of the car before he jumps off of it, and this introduces the main plot of the villain (you see, the villain believes that Batman can’t possibly be a single person, so he has convinced himself that these famous triplets are really all Batman together, so he is trying to capture each one of them. Batman plays along with the plan by enlisting the help of the twins to pretend to be him to trick the villain into thinking he has captured “Batman”)…

Batman gets the bomb off of Gordon's car

That DOES sound a lot like Speed, right?

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What was the origin of the film, Speed?

Generally speaking, when a creator tells of how they came up with a movie, if it’s all “I came up with it all on my own with no influences,” then that is sketchy enough that I’m a bit more willing to believe claims that they secretly took inspiration from something else. However, when screenwriters are very open about the pop culture that influenced their story, then I tend to believe them, as, well, why lie about taking from source A and not source B? It’s why I tend to believe Rob Liefeld when he says Deathstroke was not an influence on Deadpool. Liefeld has credited Spider-Man, Wolverine, Boba Fett and Snake Eyes to his Deadpool design, so what possible motivation would he have for saying that these four characters were influences, but not this fifth character?

And Graham Yost, the screenwriter who came up with Speed, has been clear that the influence was his father telling him of an unproduced idea for a movie Akira Kurosawa had for a movie that was later made into a movie in 1985 by Andrei Konchalovsky called Runaway Train…

His father had told him that the train had to keep going because of a bomb on it. When Yost watched the movie, though, he saw that that was not the case (his father was likely confusing the film with the 1975 Japanese action film, Bullet Train, which WAS about a train with a bomb that would explode if the speed dipped under 80 miles per hour. Presumably, that was actually what inspired Rozakis and Uslan’s Batman story). It was “just” a runaway train, so Yost thought, what if there WAS a bomb forcing it to keep going? As he later recalled:

“One thing my dad used to do was re-direct movies in his head, finding ways to improve them,” Graham says. When Graham did the same to Konchalovsky’s movie one day, he found his creative juices started flowing. “I thought, ‘A bomb would be better, that would be more dynamic, and scarier,'” he explained, “And then I thought, a train is just so linear, you know where a train is going. It’s just going to head out into the country and then you get everyone off, and everything’s fine … going 50 mph in L.A. traffic is absurd, but it’s certainly scarier.”

Initially, Yost planned the bus to have to not dip below 20 miles per hour, but it was a friend of his who told him to change it to 50 miles per hour. Also, not really important for this legend, but I just think it is funny that Yost originally wanted to call the film, Minimum Speed, before he realized that you really never want to use the world “minimum” in your action movie title.

I tend to think Yost is telling the truth, so I’m going with a false here. Not to mention that since Bullet Train predated the Batman story, if any story influenced Yost, it was that.

Thanks so much to my pal, Mordechai, for the suggestion, and thanks to Graham Yost for the lowdown on the origins of Speed! And thanks to reader James G. for reminding me of Bullet Train!