Hussar, it's rather pointless going around in circles with you over this.
[MENTION=4937]I mean, Christopher Nolan manages to tell that entire story in two hours. He goes from boy Bruce Wayne to Batman in a bit over two hours.
No he doesn't. After watching Batman begins, we don't have even a remote sense about how he begins, and much of the story we know about from the comics about Batman's past is left untold. We get this in media res scene where Batman is suddenly in Tibet, and then we get a few tidbits that show the highlights of his relationship with 'The League of Shadows'. At one point Nolan resorts to doing a flashback within a flashback to try to tell the audience what is going on. But despite that, we get no deep involvement with Talia at all (or if IRC no even mention) or any real idea of the scope of Bruce's adventures in this period. The Ressurection Pit isn't introduced. All of that will need flashbacks in further movies (that wouldn't be forthcoming) if we were ever to do other stories. Nolan only tells the minimal part of Batman's past necessary to tell the one abbreviated and highly unsatisfying plot hole filled story he's going to be telling about Ra's Al Ghul's attack on Gotham, and his very abbreviated version of how Batman becomes the Dark Knight. Honestly, if you are going to talk about terseness in story telling, the average episode of Batman the Animated Series packed in more story in to 24 minutes and better told than Batman Begins.
The idea that it should take that long to tell a story is, to me, utterly ridiculous. There's no way a story should take that long to tell.
Don't even start. The fact that you compared an RPG to a movie means you have no idea how the two mediums work. Movies can tell their stories out of sequence. That would be really hard to do in an RPG. Movies can use all sorts of railroading techniques that players would probably never put up with, because the characters in a movie don't have free will and are, for these purposes, all merely NPCs. Do you want to watch the GM tell a story or do you actually want to play it out? If you want to game out a two hour back story for your 10th level character, you can certainly do that. You have a couple of quick acts, and boom, give him the player enough XP to be 10th level. Skip a bunch of years at time, "Three years pass while you learn from Master Wu, then one day...", and then you are up to the present and can start your real story in earnest. Or you could just put that all in a paragraph of the PC's backstory, and get on with your real story without the fuss. Unlike a movie, it's not like you need to spend time defining to the audience who the protagonist is; in an RPG, hopeful the player has some notion of that already.
At one I started to write a story hour for my current campaign. It didn't take me that long to quit. I realized at the current pace I was going (not even halfway through the first session, even leaving things out), it would take me hundreds of pages to catch up to the 'present' of the campaign. By now, it would be a couple of long novels worth of story, even despite being able to quickly summarize events. Most story hours I've seen of homebrews involve similarly heroic efforts to try to relate the events of the game. It's just too much work.
You aren't even thinking about why you find the character of Batman so fascinating, and yet here you are trying to tell me that you can build up that sort of hold on the imagination of people in 2 hours? Do you think that 'Batman Begins' would have even worked as a movie at all if people didn't have some connection with the character before the movie?
UPDATE: And one more thing before I depart from this topic. People can watch mindless entertainment like 'Batman Begins' and completely ignore all the freaking plot holes and come out saying how awesome it is, because people who are watching things like 'Batman Begins' are people not used to thinking while they receive their entertainment, a quality they generally don't share with my players.
