#Batman 1989 movie

In earnest, the idea of returning to Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s original vision of a dark avenger of the night lacked appeal throughout all of Hollywood, even after Superman: The Movie proved a man could fly in 1978. “Oh come on, Michael, they’re both out of the funny pages!” More recently, Uslan told Back Issue for their special Batman 30th anniversary edition about the time a Columbia boss shrugged it was doomed because the Annie (1982) musical flopped. In 2009, Uslan told an audience this writer was in about a United Artists executive who’d said to him that a Batman and Robin movie could never work because Robin and Marian flopped at the box office and “Robin has to be in the title.” ( Robin and Marian was an elegiac Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn drama about the middle-age and deaths of Robin Hood and Maid Marian.) Many of those years, however, involved the rejection of his dream adaptation: a dark and serious action movie that returned the character to his pulpy roots. A newly minted lawyer who took more pride in teaching a graduate course on comic books at Indiana University than the law degree he earned, the fledgling producer spent a decade pursuing a Batman movie after getting the rights from DC Comics. It was in this context that Bat-fan Michael Uslan broke into Hollywood. Burton and his fellow filmmakers weren’t trying to please the fans with fidelity they were ignoring them in order to craft an eccentric vision so compelling that, like a Bat-signal in the sky, it changed the way folks thought of Batman, his world, and even their own fandom ever after its image was first projected. Folks getting upset at the casting of beloved characters is as old as the movies- and will continue to be-but this intentional departure from square jawed, forthright heroism heralded something new and different, including from the most beloved superhero movies that followed. Which brings us back to why those fans’ vitriol became front page news in The Journal: Michael Keaton cast as Batman. Yet there will never be another superhero movie quite like Batman, a fidgety and even transgressive blockbuster that still stands apart (and above most) of its descendants. Between these diametrically opposed poles, a new type of movie that would come to define 21st century cinema would emerge. As the first of its kind to forego an origin story at its inception, and to expressly target an adult audience over the demands of strictly being seen as a “family picture,” Batman deserves as much credit as Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie for providing a foundational basis to its genre. While hardly the original big budgeted superhero movie, it would go on to become one of the most influential. Such was the painful birth of Batman into the world. But with a headline reading “Batman Fans Fear The Joke’s on Them in Hollywood Epic,” no producer was exactly laughing eight months before the launch of the then-third most expensive movie ever made. In an era before the internet, or even superhero domination of the box office, getting your quirky action movie hyped on the front page and above the fold of The Wall Street Journal should seem like a gift. The truism that all press is good press was tested early, and relentlessly, during the production of Tim Burton’s Batman.

Batman 1989