Pilou Asbæk portrays Batou in the 2017 live action film. "The manga is very philosophical, very weird, very spiritual," said Asbæk. "So I knew that my job with Batou was to bring in a little bit of heart and soul into this futuristic sci-fi world." Asbæk had a hard time understanding his character until he looked back at the "Ghost in the Shell" source material. "I didn’t have any idea what to do with the character and then I looked at the manga again, and I saw two things. I saw he likes beer, and he likes pizza. And if you know me for five minutes, that’s 80 percent of my personality!" he said. The novelization of the film describes Batou as a Scandinavian. Batou starts out with normal eyes, but later suffers blindness from an explosion; he replaces then with inhuman-looking prosthetics. In his free time, Batou feeds stray dogs.