Batman changed how blockbusters look—and how Hollywood sold them
Batman wasn’t just the biggest movie of 1989—it was a cultural phenomenon
Image: Graphic: Jimmy HasseScreenshot: Warner Bros. Pictures Film Features Batman
In honor of The Batman opening this week, we are rerunning some of our favorite features about the Caped Crusader. This article originally ran on June 26, 2020.
The Popcorn Champs
The Popcorn Champs looks back at the highest grossing movie in America from every year since 1960. In tracing the evolution of blockbuster cinema, maybe we can answer a question Hollywood has been asking itself for more than a century: What do people want to see?
It took five years to get the Ghostbusters back on screen. 1984’s Ghostbusters had struck gold, capturing public imagination and pulling in more money than almost anything else that year. A sequel was the obvious move, but the original Ghostbusters stars weren’t sure they wanted to make one. The executives at Columbia Pictures had an internal war over how much budget they wanted to allocate. Co-writers Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis labored over a script that they felt would send a message about the toxic environment of American cities. They got paid a whole ton of money.
Finally, it all came together, and Ghostbusters II opened huge in the middle of June 1989. In its first three days in theaters, the film made nearly $30 million, setting a new record. That record would not stand long. One week later, another long-gestating big-budget spectacle of a movie came out and utterly lapped it. In its first three days, Tim Burton’s Batman outgrossed that first Ghostbusters II weekend by more than $10 million.
Batman wasn’t just the biggest movie of 1989. It was a cultural phenomenon. There were toys, posters, costumes. There was a Batman cereal. Virtually every kid I knew owned at least one Batman T-shirt. Prince, then somewhere near the peak of his powers, made a whole album of Batman-inspired songs, most of which didn’t even appear in the film.
In a lot of ways, 1989 was the first real modern movie summer, at least in the way we understand that concept now. Many of the year’s biggest hits were sequels: Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, Back To The Future Part II, the aforementioned Ghostbusters II. The surprise smashes were high-concept family films like Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, Look Who’s Talking, and The Little Mermaid, the last of which kicked off a whole renaissance of Disney animated flicks. The Oscars that year virtually ignored all the big box-office successes, instead rewarding middlebrow prestige fare like Driving Miss Daisy and Born On The Fourth Of July—both successes, but not exactly blockbusters—which helped codify the divide between Oscar movies and popcorn movies.
And then there was Batman, which towered over this entire landscape like a sort of ominous gothic spire. In a lot of ways, Batman is the movie that perfected the whole summer-blockbuster approach, in marketing as well as content. Batman isn’t a sequel, but it still relies, the way sequels do, on the idea of brand awareness. The producers could rest assured that virtually everyone in the ticket-buying public at least had some idea who Batman and the Joker were, and they built on that. To that simple one-word premise, they added big stars, layers of mythology, and a whole ton of sensationalistic imagery. The formula worked. Jaws and Star Wars are generally credited (and derided) with representing the birth of blockbuster cinema. But neither film fully embraced sheer absurdist spectacle quite like Batman.
All of this seems completely obvious in retrospect, but it was an arduous process to get Batman to the screen. Executive producer Michael Uslan, who’d taken pride in teaching the first accredited college-level class about comic books as folklore, had bought the rights to the Batman character in 1979, when he was a young lawyer. For years, Uslan tried to sell different studios on the idea of a dark, serious Batman movie. Most of them either wanted some version of the knowingly campy ’60s TV show, or they didn’t want anything to do with the idea. Superman: The Movie had been a huge hit a decade earlier, but the ensuing sequels had been progressively crappier and less successful, and nobody else had mounted a real major superhero film. Executives weren’t convinced that adults would pay money to see a story about a children’s character.
Eventually, Uslan was able to convince Rain Man producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber that Batman was a good idea, and the two of them recruited Tim Burton, a director who had made only two movies and who was not yet 30. Burton, a former animator, had quickly cultivated a reputation as someone who could stretch budgets and make movies that over-performed at the box office. Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Burton’s debut, was one of the great left-field successes of the mid-’80s. Beetlejuice, his follow-up, was one of 1988’s biggest hits. And while Burton had never been a comic book fan, Beetlejuice had certainly shown that he had the visual imagination to make something special.
Making Batman, Burton clashed bitterly with his producers over just about every decision. He used up most of his juice in convincing them to cast his Beetlejuice collaborator Michael Keaton as Batman. The director knew that Batman was a fundamentally disturbed character, a billionaire who thinks that he can put his money to its best use by dressing up in rubber and dangling purse-snatchers off of fire escapes. Keaton had the kind of manic energy that could make something like that work. But Keaton wasn’t big or physically imposing, and he was mostly famous for down-the-middle comedies like Mr. Mom. Incensed Batman fans sent tens of thousands of letters—actual written letters, on paper, sent with stamps—to the Warner Bros. offices to complain about the casting. No film executive would face down that kind of fan insurrection now. The Twitter ratios would be through the roof.
The letters weren’t the only problem. Sean Young, originally cast as Vicki Vale, was injured while horseback riding, and Kim Basinger had to come in as a last-second replacement. The budget ballooned. The London set was under siege from photographers, all competing to see who could be the first to get pictures of the stars in costume. Michael Keaton and the stuntmen could barely move in the different Bat-costumes, so all the fight scenes had to be edited into dark blurs. Screenwriters were coming in to do script polishes, and other screenwriters weren’t being told about those polishes. It was a mess.
And yet the various head-butting collaborators managed to make exactly what the ticket-buying public wanted to see in 1989. Batman is, in some ways, a giddy and schticky ’80s action movie dressed up in arty German Expressionist drag. It’s a showcase for dense, imaginative gothic screencraft. (Less than two years before his death, Anton Furst won an Oscar for the Batman production design. His was the only nomination for the film.) Batman also is a pyro-addled stunt show that occasionally dissolves into absurdist prop comedy, as in the great and nonsensical moment where the Joker pulls a gigantic revolver out of his pants. And most often Batman is a sheer over-the-top star vehicle.
Getting Jack Nicholson to play the Joker is the sort of coup that ultimately changes the course of movie-business history. Originally, Burton was interested in casting people like John Lithgow and Tim Curry in the villain role. (Curry had even signed a deal to do it.) Both of those actors obviously could’ve done the job, but with them in the role, it seems far less likely that Batman would have outgrossed Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade or that it would’ve signaled a Hollywood sea change.
Nicholson, at the time, was the very definition of a larger-than-life movie star. He’d won two Oscars, and he’d been nominated for seven more. He’d been a crucial part of the ’70s New Hollywood wave, and in the process, he’d remade the entire idea of film stardom in his own horny, scene-gobbling image. Nicholson had also just played the literal Christian devil in The Witches Of Eastwick—a role that, in retrospect, now seems like an extended dress rehearsal for Batman. Most importantly, he was really into the idea of playing the Joker.
Nicholson had caveats, of course. He had to have top billing on the movie despite not playing the title character. He had to be paid vast sums of money. Nicholson got a big piece of the Batman grosses, which ended up earning him somewhere between $60 and $90 million for the role. Nicholson also earned money from the merchandise and even the Batman sequels, though he wasn’t in them. It’s still one of the all-time biggest paychecks for a single movie. The makeup artists had to work around Nicholson’s allergy to spirit gum, and they had to find a way to present a flashy, theatrical Joker who was still recognizable as being Jack Nicholson. Nicholson was worth all of this.
Some of his value is in the name recognition. With one of the world’s biggest stars in the film, it suddenly seemed a whole lot more plausible that adults would pay to go see Batman. But more importantly, Nicholson just eats up the movie. He hogs the attention and the screen time. He has a blast, reeling off endlessly quotable lines that likely didn’t come from a screenwriter: “Who do you trust? Hubba hubba hubba! Money money money! Who do you truuuust?” He gibbers and leers and waltzes. He dances with wild levels of clumsy swagger.
Heath Ledger’s version of the Joker is the one that’s come to loom larger in the cultural memory. But while Ledger’s take is brilliant and mesmerizing, it might’ve ruined the character; every Joker since has been all sweaty and malformed. Joaquin Phoenix seemed to hate his own existence when he played it. Nicholson, on the other hand, doesn’t hate anything—not even Batman. He just wants people’s attention, something he figures he can earn by killing them.
He’s also wildly charismatic. The Joker is a known murderer who killed a mob boss in broad daylight in front of cameras, and he’s also a suspected terrorist in possession of chemical weapons. But throngs of Gotham citizens still clog the streets when the Joker shows up to throw money from a parade float. Nicholson makes this seem vaguely plausible, at least within the movie’s skewed reality. His Joker is so magnetic that crowds of people risk almost-certain death just to hang out around him (also, to grab some free cash).
Nothing about the Joker makes sense—the indiscriminate spraying of poison gas, the rampant shootings of his own underlings, the willingness to get into a fistfight with Batman that he can’t possibly win, the go-to dance move where he kind of pumps his cane in the air. It’s all perfectly unhinged, which makes it entirely in keeping with the Joker character. And it also works because Tim Burton situates Nicholson in a world where nothing makes sense.
Burton’s Gotham City looks a bit like the ’40s Los Angeles of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, if the cartoon and film noir aesthetics had somehow been fused into one. Thanks to Danny Elfman’s thunderously brooding score, it sounds like that, too. Burton surrounds his stars with larger-than-life figures like Jack Palance and Billy Dee Williams, both of whom get minimal screen time. To watch the movie is to plunge into its world, to lose all grip on our own.
And while he’s more of a supporting player in his own movie, Michael Keaton remains an endlessly compelling Batman—itchy and distracted whenever he has to pretend to be Bruce Wayne, icy and purposeful whenever he’s getting to live out his true identity as the guy in the bat costume. Burton presents Batman and the Joker as complementary lunatics: two deranged misfits who are least comfortable whenever they attempt to resemble regular people. (Joker has to put on flesh-toned makeup in order to disguise himself as a human being. It’s not convincing, and it’s somehow creepier than his regular clown face.)
Batman isn’t all that heavy on action scenes, and the set pieces are sloppy and incoherent by today’s standards. It’s meaner and more vicious than your standard PG-13 blockbuster fare. It’s built more on performances and on a very particular director’s vision. But Batman is a true inflection point, dividing film history into the before and after. With its wild, outsized success, Batman ended the age when a quiet, character-driven chamber piece like Rain Man could dominate the box office. After Batman, every big movie had to be a noisy event. This was happening anyway. If it hadn’t been Batman, it would’ve been something else—Ghostbusters II, maybe. But to anyone watching the way history unfolded, Batman is still the glowing signal in the sky, the sign that everything had changed.
The contender: A funny thing about those big 1989 summer sequels: They’re mostly pretty good. Lethal Weapon 2 sharpened the buddy-cop patter of the first film, adding some good comic relief and some loathsome villains, and it became a much bigger deal than the first film. Ghostbusters II gave Bill Murray a chance to deadpan about a river of pink slime and a walking Statue Of Liberty. Back To The Future Part II used the magic of time travel to twist its plot up into some truly fun pretzels. And Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade fulfilled the promise of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, bringing back the giddy charm that had gone missing in 1984’s Temple Of Doom.
For his third Indiana Jones movie, the No. 2 highest grosser of 1989, Steven Spielberg is so in love with movie history that he casts the literal James Bond as Indy’s father, but he’s also irreverent enough to make the character into a fussy, hapless professorial gasbag. Spielberg turns his jokes into action scenes and his action scenes into jokes, and he keeps his touch light even when he’s dealing with ancient mysteries and Biblical prophecies. In its own way, The Last Crusade is nearly as miraculous as Raiders—a zippy multiplex entertainment that remains endlessly rewatchable decades later.
469 Comments
Watching Batman in the theater opening weekend had a fairly specific buzz to it: nobody was entirely sure what was going to happen next for most of the movie, then everyone was disappointed that it devolved into a fistfight.Which also became a template for future superhero movies.
One template I didn’t like that was kept across nearly modern day superhero movies, which was killing off the villain at the end. As a comic book nerd I wanted the possibility of Batman fighting Joker again or Spider-Man taking on Doctor Octopus again. Killing the bad guy at the end made it too neat and tidy.
I agree. It feels like the writer got to the end of the CGI-palioza climax and was told to “give it dramatic heft – the Shakespearean shit”.
It’s really rare in Superhero movies that the villain isn’t killed off by the end. The most recent examples are probably with Zemo in Cap 3, Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Thanos in Infinity War.Also Batman choice to never kill has become a part of his character. Yeah there were a few early Golden Age stories where he killed but that lasted less than a year before it was decided he shouldn’t kill. Largely so he could have a Rogue’s Gallery but also because they had just introduced Robin and Editorial wanted to make the book more kid-friendly.
Those last two panels are so great. I hate that Nolan uses that bit in Dark Knight Rises and Bale’s line delivery ruins it.
Always loved that bit (and the rest of Kingdom Come as well). “So that’s what that feels like.” Brilliant.
“ The most recent examples are probably with Zemo in Cap 3, Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Thanos in Infinity War.”Also Ant-Man and the Wasp, Captain Marvel and Batman V Superman. Plenty of early Marvel kept villains/secondary villains alive – Incredible Hulk (Abomination), Iron Man 2 (Justin Hammer), Thor (Loki), Avengers (Loki, again)… All the lead villains die in Phase 2 though.
‘Kingdom Come’ is, in my experience, the best Batman-and-Superman-as-rivals story there is. Frank Miller went too far, in my opinion, making Clark ridiculously earnest and Bruce a psychopath. But Waid and Ross really drilled down into the philosophies of the two characters and why they have such different approached to the same general goal. And then you get this scene, where Superman appeals to that fundamental commonality to them – that life is precious, every life, and that neither of them can stand by and watch it senselessly taken.Beats the hell out of their mums both being called “Martha”.
Why did Alex Ross cast Ted Knight as old Bruce
The Dark Knight was the one film that specifically didn’t do that, because I imagine they thought about having the Joker appear in future films. Cleary Heath Ledger’s untimely death prevented that, but it looks like Christopher Nolan was smart enough to know it would be good to keep the Joker available in the rogue’s gallery.
It certainly seemed like the Scarecrow’s role in the third Nolan filmed was intended to be filled by the Joker.
That was the most Burtonian scene in all those movies – desks stacked on top of desks with rolls of paper spooling down and there’s a guy on the top desk being an authoritarian prick.
I’ve heard this, but honestly, I think The Joker deserved better than that Scarecrow role. It’s kind of a big goofy gag that just wouldn’t have tracked well with what we know of his character.
There’s no way that was all we were going to get from the Joker in that film, a glorified cameo.
I think Ledger dying meant they had to start pretty much from scratch with what the third movie was going to be. It shows both in the script and in the filmmaking– I don’t think Nolan’s heart was in it as much in the third film.
People say this a lot, but I don’t buy it. I feel like it was always meant to be Scarecrow in the Kangaroo Court. The first time we see Crane in ‘Batman Begins’ is in court, corrupting the justice system as a professional witness. Then we see him in the last movie in court, rendering justice completely farcical as a hanging judge. It shows that not only has all of Batman’s work over the years been undone, but that things have gotten worse then they ever were; Scarecrow can now make a mockery of justice out in the open.
I bet the producers of Batman regretted killing the Joker, but killing the bad guy was just standard practice back then, when a sequel was far from guaranteed and the idea of setting up cinematic universes with plotlines that would pay off eight movies later just seemed insane. In fact, I KNOW they regretted killing him, because the never-produced script for Batman 5 bends over backwards to find an excuse to bring Nicholsan back as Mr. J (the villain is the Scarecrow, but most of the plot involves Bats being driven mad by Scarecrow’s fear gas and hallucinating that the Joker is back and he has to stop him.)
(the villain is the Scarecrow, but most of the plot involves Bats being driven mad by Scarecrow’s fear gas and hallucinating that the Joker is back and he has to stop him.)Lest anyone not know: this is, word for word, (most of) the plot of Arkham Knight, except for the cause of the hallucination.
It also makes the contracts neat and tidy, which is probably the biggest influence. You can lock down an actor for a multi-picture deal if they’re playing the title character, but just imagine trying to contract Jack Nicholson for multiple Batman movies with the caveat that he might or might not play a prominent role in all of them. There are things about superhero movies that I find exhausting, and especially as they get more popular and spin out into larger series, the cynical economics really wear on me. I haven’t seen the newest Avengers movies, but it sounds like their plots revolve around closing out the top-billed actors’ contracts.
I would say give Infinity War and Endgame a watch. The first is great comic book film (IMO) with a downer ending, while the latter is sort of three films at once.
I mostly checked out after Civil War and Guardians of the Galaxy – neither one of them did anything for me, and they seem to be consensus favorites among whatever Phase they belonged to. When I tried watching Ant Man and Black Panther I had the same issue – they have great casts and some interesting moments, but the plots can’t generate any tension and the action sequences are mostly just CGI thingies whizzing past each other. I liked Homecoming a lot, except when it tied itself into the MCU, so I haven’t bothered with Far From Home. I was a little excited at the prospect of the current version of Spider-Man leaving the MCU, but obviously that’s not a popular opinion. And really, 7 hours’ worth of Avengers is a big commitment. I still haven’t seen Seven Samurai, and I could watch it twice in that amount of time.
“I still haven’t seen Seven Samurai”
Have you seen Three Amigos? It’s the same movie. There’s just four extra guys.
A plethora of extra guys.
Watch Seven Samurai.
I’d say you’ve done your diligence. If Civil War and GotG didn’t interest you, Avengers is really not doing anything different, just bigger.
Seven Samurai, however, is a fucking masterpiece, and gets better every time I watch it.
The worst offender was Dick Tracy- they killed off pretty much every villain in Tracy’s rogues gallery in the final scene. I guess they weren’t anticipating any sequels.
Beatty was already anticipating preventing any more Dick Tracy movies being made forever.
The comic strip killed most of the villains off. My favorite was The Brow getting impaled on a flagpole.
True- but they were killed off one at a time over the course of years, if not decades. The movie just got rid of them all in one fell swoop.
It’s not just superhero stuff – virtually every action/adventure movie since the 70s has killed the villain.
When I actually saw the original “Cape Fear” around 1995 or so, I was frankly amazed that it didn’t happen in that.
The trope has been discussed – it may boil down to increased distrust of the law enforcement translating into endings in which the villain is simply captured aren’t “satisfying” enough for modern audiences.
I remember a couple of crowd-groan moments on Batman’s opening weekend – the Batwing pausing in front of the moon, and then Batman standing on that gargoyle at the end – but I can’t say they were anywhere near as intense as the ones in On Deadly Ground.
My opening weekend audience of Batman had the opposite reaction. The biggest cheer of the movie came when the Batwing was silhouetted against the moon.
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 1989 Post:The Numbers1 Batman, Warner Bros., $251,188,9242 Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, Paramount Pictures, $197,171,8063 Lethal Weapon 2, Warner Bros., $147,253,9864 Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, Disney, $130,724,1725 Rain Man, MGM, $125,649,5606 Look Who’s Talking, TriStar, $120,409,4767 Ghostbusters II, Columbia, $112,494,7388 Back To The Future Part II, Universal, $103,826,8369 Parenthood, Universal, $100,047,83010 Dead Poets Society, Disney/Touchstone Pictures, $95,860,116Wikipedia1 Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, Paramount, $474,171,8062 Batman, Warner Bros., $411,348,9243 Back To The Future Part II, Universal, $331,950,0024 Look Who’s Talking, TriStar, $296,999,8135 Dead Poets Society, Disney/Touchstone Pictures, $235,860,1166 Lethal Weapon 2, Warner Bros., $227,853,9867 Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, Disney, $222,724,1728 Ghostbusters II, Columbia, $215,394,7389 The Little Mermaid, Disney, $184,155,86310 Born On The Fourth Of July, Universal, $161,001,698
Pretty solid top 10, even if Ghostbusters II never reaches the levels of the first one.
Yeah, for all that “Ghostbusters II” is a retread of I, I remember we had that VHS on at our house about as often, and it’s not as bad as its reputation, especially compared to a lot of the other sequels of the late ‘80s.
Reading this article was kind of a weird experience. I’ve never seen the Lethal Weapon movies, so I’ll leave those aside, but people’s affection for stuff like Back to the Future Part 2 and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids just baffles me. They’re cute, and they’re certainly not bad. They’re fine. Even Batman is a hard movie to say nice things about – it’s telling that most of this article is about behind-the-scenes drama and Jack Nicholson’s performance. Last Crusade and the Little Mermaid are the only two on that list that I’d say are entirely watchable. One of the interesting things about this column as it heads into the 90s is the disconnect (which was always there but I suspect will become more noticeable) between the movies that made a lot of money and the much more interesting and influential movies that didn’t break the top 10. Like, 1989 is the year that brought us Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the Burbs, Heathers, Say Anything…, When Harry Met Sally, Teen Witch, Earth Girls Are Easy, Vampire’s Kiss, UHF, Uncle Buck, Sex Lies and Videotape, Drugstore Cowboy, and Mystery Train. And of course Do the Right Thing.
My 12 year old daughter and her 10 year old cousin just tried to watch the BTTF Trilogy last night. They got through the first one and 20 minutes into the second one before they abandoned the project as “boomer garbage.”
Noooooooooo.I fear for our future. BTTF is the best trilogy of all time, I genuinely mean that.I’m sure in the minority with that thinking.
I have fond memories of going to see BTTFII with my family and loving every minute of it, I would probably go as far to say that I enjoy it more then the 1st movie, it’s not better by any means. I remember seeing Last Crusade at a drive in.
“BTTF is the best trilogy of all time”You might need to reconsider some things. Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies ever, but the second and third practically define sequel-itis.
Your claim is helped by the fact that trilogies are rare things now. Indy, Star Wars (though you can cheat and break that down), Die Hard, Mad Max, Scream… Even more recent great trilogies like Bourne and Toy Story have expanded. But, as much as I love BTTF (1 is perfect, 2 is amazing and my favourite, 3 is a lot of fun), it’s below the Before… and LOTR trilogies for me.
My issue with LotR trilogy is that they are great films to look at, but I didn’t find any of them ‘fun’.
I can see that (even if I find them to be a lot of fun – though that’s not their top priority)
Totally agree – the story was mapped out before filming began, which is the recipe for success, in my opinion. Heck, even parts II & III were filmed at the same time. I wish modern trilogies stuck to this type of tight story telling.
The story for the trilogy wasn’t mapped out before the first film. They didn’te even plan on doing more than one at the start. Zemeckis and Gale have said how the future bit at the end of the first film was meant as a cute joke, not a cliffhanger, and if they had been planning on doing a second one they wouldn’t have done that (not only did it leave them trapped doing a future bit at the start of the second film but it also left them stuck with the Jennifer character – hence them getting rid of her as soon as they could in the sequel).
Ha. I liked the first one a lot when I was about 11, and I enjoyed it a few years ago. I didn’t see the other ones until I was an adult, and I can’t imagine wanting to rewatch either of them.
Your 12 year old actually refers to stuff as Boomer Garbage? Wow, and I thought my generation was bad.
That specific characterization of BttF 2 seems like a weird take, but I do think it’s the poorest quality of the three. (I only watch it for the sake of following the story through — I’ll watch the original and 3 on their own.)
I feel like some movies’ reputations just run largely on the fumes of nostalgia. It’s the only explanation I can see for all the fond memories people have of stuff like Hocus Pocus and Space Jam.
As a parent, Honey I Shrunk the Kids blows most modern kids movies out of the water. My kids looooved it as well.
It was a good year to be Rick Moranis, too! He starred (or co-starred) in three of the top 10 grossing movies.
Damn, that was a good year for movies.
Not a one that I wouldn’t rewatch, with the lowest on the list being the “best” one, dead poets.
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post:The Godfather (1972)2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)The Exorcist (1973)Jaws (1975)Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)Blazing Saddles (1974)Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)Rocky (1976)The Graduate (1967)West Side Story (1961)Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Back To The Future (1985)Batman (1989)Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (1983)Spartacus (1960)Rain Man (1988)Kramer VS Kramer (1979)Top Gun (1986)The Longest Day (1962)Three Men And A Baby (1987)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Grease (1978)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)
3 more decades to go ! You’ll see how much better My Fair Lady does after 60 of these
Man, I was so excited about this film back in the day. I’d just read The Dark Knight Returns, and was expecting something equally dark and gritty. It ended up being one of those things I tried to force my brain into liking; as a film, it’s a howling mediocrity, but everything else about it is so cool: cast, production design, music, etc. And then, with each sequel, it slid further and further into pantomime.
I did something with 1989’s Batman that would seem absurd today; I read the novelization months before the movie came out.Even prior to the internet being a thing, you’d think they would be concerned about word odd mouth ruining the box office.
Haha I did the same with the comic book adaption of Batman Returns.
I remember knowing the words to the dance scene between Bruce and Selina and my mates sitting next to me asking if I’d seen the film already.
Wow, I didn’t realize they released that so far ahead of the movie. I had the 1st movie’s comic adaptation but I feel like they released that one right on top of the film. Maybe that one was also a bit before. I mean, it was 30 years ago.
Sorry I mean BR adaptation was released in 1992, round about when the film got released in July in UK.
Right, but still with enough lead time to know what will happen in the movie before it premiers.
Ah right, gotcha!
Yeah, back then it wasn’t unheard of for a movie to hit Ireland and the UK over a year later than the states…Even up to the early 2000s it was still happening ( I remember having a Region 1 DVD of Blade about a month before it hit cinemas here. A combination of the Internet and Piracy pretty much killed the practic , although Pixar and Disney were some of the last holdouts.( I had a Russian sourced ‘copy ‘ of Wreck it Ralph ‘ 6 months before it was on screens over here).
It was pretty common to release the novelization months ahead of the film. I think it’s one of those things you can chalk up to Star Wars. The Star Wars novelization was released in November, 1976 and the film wouldn’t be in theaters until May, 1977 (even then, it was only in select markets). It was seen as a way to build hype for the movies release.
I remember that the comic adaption of Batman and Robin begins with a splash page showing the entire thing taking place on a movie set, complete with a camera crew filming our heroes in front of a green screen. From page two on it’s a standard adaption of the movie, except it ends with a voice from off-panel shouting “Cut! That’s a wrap!” I guess they wanted to make sure no one thought this was DC Universe canon.
I can’t think why 🙂
Just after he says that, the popular Batman villain Captain Giant Meteor bursts through the window and yells “THAT’S NOT WHAT KILLED THEM, QUIT STEALING MY THUNDER!”
Still sitting in my bookshelf next to the BTTF novelizations.
I may still have a well-worn copy of Gremlins 2: The New Batch somewhere at my parents’ house.
I am pretty sure I had that one but I think I gave it to the library a while back. Kept Batman, BTTF, Batman Knightfall, Death and Life of Superman and the Star Wars trilogy.Do they make novels out of comic series like that anymore? I have to figure that they don’t because looking back on it I’m still kinda confused about the idea.
I think it’s been years since anyone turned an actual comics arc into a novel. The thing now is to hire a YA author to pen an original story.
Didn’t really think so.
Like you said, it was a weird idea. Did they really think they were going to reach a new audience?
Well they suckered me into paying for the comics and the novelizations!But of course that was the ‘90s collectors boom and they also suckered me into buying 5 copies of X-Men #1 which are still in boxes less than 20 feet from where I’m sitting so…
Did you get one copy of each cover?
Of course! And two copies each of the polybagged X-Cutioners Song series so I could leave one in the bag and read one!
Chump!
Turns out 11 year olds don’t really have an eye for good investments, who knew?That said, ya know anyone who wants to buy some comics? I have the first appearances of both Carnage and Squirrel Girl!
I was in college during that time, and I’m a bit sad I missed out, if only so I could have asked people why fuck they were wasting their money.Side note: There was a comic shop in my college town, but it was shut down after the owner was arrested for selling that dirty Elementals book. My girlfriend at the time clerked for credit at the law firm representing him.
Yeah I was spending my $10/week allowance on ‘em, not really a big deal, but some people went really heavy into it and they should really have known better.
I was in a shop back in ‘94 or so and some guy who practically had “speculator” written on his forehead came in and tried to sell what he’d bought during the boom. The owner humored him by flipping through what he had before sending him on his way.
Sounds about right.On the plus side I got some decent wall art out of it, I’ve started buying comic frames and putting stuff like Infinity Gauntlet and Spawn #1 up on my wall:)
Oh my ‘collectors phase’ of comic book reading has left me with quite a few duds.Bless Marvel and their weird embossed covers era.
Oh god no kidding on that one. I went through all my comics last winter and there were some doozies. Shiny holofoil with random patterns, double embossed with cutouts, etc…
Nope, check out Titan Books’ marvel series. Dark Phoenix, Civil War, a bunch of others.
Huh, didn’t know that.
I have most of them!
How are they? Any good? Do you just have the adaptations or the original stories they did too?
They do indeed. Look up Titan Book’s marvel series
Well I’ll be dipped!
I think they still occasionally novelize a big event story or famous run. Although the last one I can think of was Final Crisis, which is pretty old now so maybe they have stopped.
I remember that one summer – probably 1995? – my Mom made me read the novelization of BttF III before she would rent the VHS for me to watch. It was the only BttF movie I still hadn’t seen (I watched the original a lot when I was very young, and I’d caught all of II in bits and pieces as it was in pretty heavy cable rotation by that point.)The thing that always stuck with me is that the novelization has a surprisingly heavy scene where Marshall Strickland gets gunned down by the Tannen gang in front of his son. As I was watching the movie, I kept waiting with dread for that moment to arrive, and was confused when it was clear that it wouldn’t be happening. Only years later would IMDB tell me that it hadn’t made the final cut because, at some point, it was decided that it was tonally inconsistent with the rest of the film.
That’s one of the things I liked about the novelizations: They had scenes that were cut from the movie.
The Bttf novelisation is just…something else.Its that odd that Ryan North wrote a whole BOOK about it.
There weren’t spoiler babies back then. People realized you could known how a movie ended without it ruining the experience. I still have my copy of the original “Star Wars” novelization with the Ralph McGuarrie cover art that came out ages before the film. Having read it half a year in advance didn’t hamper the enjoyment of the movie for me at all because the film in my head was so different in tone and look.At one time (40s-50s) it was common practice for people to walk into movies at midpoint, sit through the end, watch the next feature and, if they were interested, sit through the beginning of the first film again. Nobody shit their pants. Everything was fine. Movies were just movies and the real world with a real life was outside.
When I first started going to movies in the late seventies and early eighties we would often leave one film after it finished, sneak into another and if it was good, just sit there as the theater emptied at the finish and wait for it to restart to catch the opening. Did it all the time.
To this day, a friend of mine insists that Star Wars was “based on a novel”. (He saw the movie novelisation on sale long before the movie was released. I have explained this was common practise in those days, to no avail).Similarly, I know someone who insists that Tron was based on the arcade game (you know, the one that was released to promote the upcoming film). *Sigh*
The Phantom Menace novelization came out about a month before the movie. I remember reading it a bookstore when it came out.
I recall the habit of being able to walk into a movie mid-way and stay for the next screening continuing well into the ‘80s, so long as showings weren’t selling out. Sometimes a studio issued a special demand that exhibitors not let anyone in after the curtain, like they did with Psycho. It was pretty late in the ‘80s that emptying out the theater between showings became standard practice for every showing, regardless of ticket sales. Strangely (given today’s topic) I associate that change with Batman’s release, which was also the first time I remember a single movie taking over an entire multiplex’s screens so they could offer a new screening every 30 minutes throughout the day.
That original Star Wars novelization (credited to Lucas, but actually ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster, who practically made a whole career out of novelizations) is notable for having come out in November 1976, a good six months before the film’s release.I think that was the result of a combination of partly Fox being nervous about the movie’s prospects (!) and thus wanting the novel out there to help “pre-sell” the movie to the hardcore sci-fi geeks they believed to be the movie’s primary audience, and partly the movie being originally intended for a December 1976 release that Lucas realized during production it couldn’t possibly meet, but by the time the movie was rescheduled the novel’s release (with the long lead times of the 1970s publishing industry) might have already been set.
I was ten when Batman Forever came out, and I devoured the novelization. I hung the foldout poster from Nickelodeon Magazine on my bedroom wall. I declared that Batman Forever was my favorite movie, based entirely on the novelization. I wasn’t even allowed to watch PG-13 movies.When I finally saw the movie at age 15 or so, it was already too late.
Back when movies got rolled out really gradually and might stay in theaters for months after, you could read the Mad Magazine parody before actually seeing the movie. I think I heard that Billy Jack/Billy Jerk worked that way.
I actually did a film review of the then-unreleased Batman for school based entirely on plot details I picked up from the Mad parody. Those things were basically Cliff’s Notes for smartarses.
My best friend had that book! He loved it, and honestly he thought the fact that they didn’t harp on the “Devil” line as much as they do in the book was a let down.
True story: for all of Star Wars’ reputation for creating a culture of secrecy around film spoilers and secret plot twists, the novelization for Return Of The Jedi came out and I read it WEEKS before the film hit theaters.
And Alan Dean Foster (the real author of the Star Wars novelization credited to George Lucas) had written his own Star Wars sequel “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye” even earlier. Which is funny (if a bit icky after Jedi) because it was implied that Luke & Leia had started a relationship.
So did the Marvel Comics adaptation.
I think I read it right after I saw the movie, because I saw it at 7 and was so terrified of the scene where Joker electrocutes that dude (classic Burton creepy face) that I kept my eyes closed for most of the movie.
I think I read the novelization too! Not before I saw the movie though.I have a memory of the scene where Bruce Wayne confronts the Joker when he’s in Vicki Vayle’s apartment. In the movie he prepares by putting a metal tray under his shirt (which stops the Joker’s bullet). But I think in the novelization he doesn’t do that, and the Joker instead shoots him in the waist because the bullet is stopped by his utility belt. And there’s another scene after this where he chases the Joker (who has taken Vicki) outside? I think that the was the major change I noticed from reading this after having seen the movie.
You’re correct about a different ending to the apartment scene. The novelization, based on an earlier film draft, has Joker kidnapping Vicki, Wayne changing to Batman in his limo, and Batman pursuing Joker on horseback through the 200th Anniversary celebration.
A magazine article I read at the time said that they did some screen tests with the costume during the daylight and determined not to go ahead with any of it because it looked terrible — which is why the apartment scene ends abruptly with a practical joke instead.
There’s a moment I think just after that where Bruce puts on a ski mask, hops on a horse and follows the Joker to a statue unveiling. The Joker and his goons terrorize the mayor at the unveiling and I don’t remember how the scene ends.
I think the only novelization I read was E.T., thanks to it being offered by Scholastic Book Club. It delved a lot deeper into the mother character, who was profoundly lonely.
There was also a sequel called ET:The Return..which was a bit …meh.
Oh man I’d forgotten all about that, except passing.
I did that with Empire Strikes Back so when it came out I already knew Vader was Luke’s father and honestly I was a little disappointed in ESB because of that.
I’m not sure if I read it ahead of seeing the movie or not, but I definitely read it at some point. Back then I loved reading all of those novelizations, part because that’s how I got to “see” the R-rated movies I wasn’t allowed to go to (and eventually would have to see at friends’ houses at sleepovers), but just because I always found them kind of interesting. Since they were written from shooting scripts rather than the finished movie, they often had extra scenes and stuff that didn’t make it to the screen. I still have the original Star Wars ones on my shelves to this day, although they’re in terrible shape.
Even the MAD Magazine parody was out before the movie. I remember my friend wondering if the costume-delivered-by-a-pizza-guy was actually going to be part of the movie.
I did that with The Abyss – was pretty disappointed there were no tidal waves in the movie.
The extended version of that was so much better because they included the tidal waves.
It’s been so long since I’ve watched the theatrical version (VHS era certainly, maybe even that opening-night theatrical release) that I can’t fully commit to agreeing to that, but without the tidal waves it doesn’t really establish that the sea-critters are the real masters of this planet, or that sinking the sub at the beginning was an intentional provocation to see if we would nuke them or not.
It did make the story feel much larger. Without the threat of what they could do by controlling the oceans, the ending in the theatrical version is a lot weaker.
I remember reading the novelization of Independence Day like a month before the movie came out so they were doing that even as late as the mid to late 90’s. Crazy. They also would put out comic book adaptions of movies pretty early too.
I had that, I just remember it being based on an earlier version of the script so there was a weird scene with Batman on horseback.
I remember noticing that scene wasn’t in the movie and not missing it.
I read the comic book adaptation first and I was obsessed with watching the movie after that. A bit scared, also. Without the goofy staging of the movie that comic book felt *dark*.
Yeah lol. I read the novelist in before. It was a weird time back then.
The tie in books coming out early was pretty standard back in the day. They also used to include a few glossy pages of still from the movie in the middle of the books. It was a simpler time then.1989 was truly a special movie year. So much of it ended up being pretty good even. I would have loved to see Curry’s Joker. Considering his take on Pennywise is such a classic today, I think he would have blown the roof off.There is no chance Keaton would have been cast today. No studio head would have had the balls to stand up to the Twitterverse calling for his head. In the end Burton was right on the money. It’s too bad Warners went off the deep end with Batman Forever and let Keaton walk away instead of working with him on the script. We could have had a nice long Batman movie series by now. (Granted Nolan’s films would then not have existed. Though I felt that Bale’s Bruce Wayne was pretty good, his Batman voice was a little forced.) I hope they both come back as rumored to put their mark on the end of Batman’s career.
The MAD Magazine parody came out a few weeks before the movie as well. I remember wondering whether some of the jokes would play out the same way in the movie.
The end part of The Last Crusade is really awful, seeming slapped together, like there wasn’t time to bother. Until Indy enters that last cave, it’s pretty great, though.
It’s hard to imagine now how huge Batman was back in 1989 for those of us at school. The teaser poster alone was a must have thing, along with Batman lunchboxes (when they were still a thing).Also the fact the film was being made in UK added a certain level of mystique to it’s release. Weirdly the biggest influence Batman had on UK cinema was the introduction of the 12 rating, which BBFC felt was needed as PG and 15 were not suitable or fair at either end of the ratings spectrum.That pretty much stayed in place until LotR and/or Spider-Man forced a change to 12A. Which is fairly useless, as any parent bringing in under 12’s defeats the point of the rating.
Getting Jack Nicholson to play the Joker is the sort of coup that
ultimately changes the course of movie-business history. Originally,
Burton was interested in casting people like John Lithgow and Tim Curry
in the villain role. (Curry had even signed a deal to do it.) Both of
those actors obviously could’ve done the job, but with them in the role,
it seems far less likely that Batman would have outgrossed Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade or that it would’ve signaled a Hollywood sea change.
I dunno the hype around the film seemed bigger than who was appearing in it. Tim Curry would have been just as batsh1t crazy as Jack in the role, while John Lithgow could have been equally fun in a probably more hammy way.
Yeah 12A is kinda pointless, and also I was just the right age for it to make a difference so it was an appreciated change at the time. I don’t get why we don’t just go the US route and allow children into a movie of any rating with an adult guardian present. I remember getting turned away from rated 15 movies by jobsworths at the cinema at age 16/17, when there was no reason I would carry an ID. Perhaps its a holdover from the ‘video nasty’ moral panic of the 80s that we still have these outdated rules.
Not sure about copying the US model. Not a good reference point but I keep thinking of South Park the Movie where the guys pay a hobo to be their “responsible adult” to let them see the Terrence and Philip film.Granted that’s an extreme and very silly example, but it did make me think it was a bit bizarre US kids could see practically any film as long as they had an adult with them.Sure there’s a lot of difference between say Pretty Woman, The Bodyguard, Deadpool and The Hangover, but I’m not sure an 8 year old should be watching the latter two. Ultimately though that’s up to the parents.
I think the point is that parents might know more about their own children, then say a shadowy cabal of old rich white men.
I specifically remember Batman being the first film with a 12 rating here, because I was ten at the time and so my parents wouldn’t take me to it even though alllllll of my friends had seen it. (In retrospect, I suspect the issue was more that my dad had no interest in going to see it. A few months later we went to see Erik the Viking, which he instantly regretted).
The issue was further complicated by the VHS release of Batman being 15.
Either because 12 hadn’t be approved for home releases or it was felt you had to be 15 to watch it from the comfort of your own home (where you could pause and rewind a scene constantly – a la Trading Places for Jamie Lee Curtis).
It took them a good while to introduce 12 for home video. Mrs Doubtfire was also caught in the middle and rated 15 until they edited out the “fuck” to make it a PGOddly though, Batman is still a 15, its never been reclassified to the 12 it had in the cinemas, despite it being far lighter on violence and language than many of the boundary-pushing 12A films of recent years. Some very odd decisions regarding reclassifications at the BBFC going on. Temple of Doom is now (rightly) a 12, whereas Raiders – complete with melting faces, bullet-hole punching and blood gurgling headshots – remains a PG. The same rating as My Neighbour Totoro.
I only found out recently that Temple of Doom was reclassified for Blu Ray and we finally get the uncut version for home release.Even though I already own all the films on DVD, I had to get them again.
You’re right, I’d forgotten that there was such a long time between 12 as a cinema rating and for home video.My Neighbour Totoro is a U, which I know from the three separate copies I bought of it due to my kids ruining the discs.Spirited Away is a PG though and believe me if you ever wanted to scare the shit out of a six year old, Spirited Away is how to do it. Anyway agreed, it’s pretty weird that Raiders is a U and is mid-afternoon weekend television.
Well MY copy is a PG. I can’t find any info on reclassification though, maybe mine is a publishing fuckup and worth billions
Well that’s interesting. BBFC’s twitter account here suggests that maybe it’s due to some bonus content on the disc.I approve of your upholstery.
Though oddly the BBFC site says all of the extras were rated as U. I think it may be a fuck up (especially as the back of the PG box is blank with no ratings detail – it’s also unusual not to note on the back if the film is rated lower than the overall DVD) but, as someone else suggests on that thread, it may be another Ghibli trailer on there (rather than Totoro extras) that push it up – the Mononoke trailer, for example, is rated PG (not sure if it’s on there). It’s sad how interesting I find this.
Though apparently the same trailers are used on other Ghibli DVDs which are still U rated. I agree with you in suspecting fuckup.Me too, though earlier this week I shared on Facebook a Graun opinion column about VAT, so you’re in bad company here.
It’s sad how interesting I find this. It’s okay you’re among friends here.
Been a long while since I’ve seen it, but although Batman is less violent than most 12As now, from what I recall there may be some behaviours and implied threats towards female characters which I guess the BBFC see as unsuitable for a younger audience.Going the other away, when I were a lad, Terminator was very definitely an 18 and considered to be so violent that it was almost in “video nasty” cultural territory. And now it’s a 15 because eh, it’s only a model.
Mrs. Doubtfire had already been reclassified as a PG at the cinema after local councils had used their power to show it as a PG rather than a 12 as the BBFC had deemed it. It was then officially made a PG after one cut for sexual references rather than language – and it was that cut that went to VHS, though it would have been late enough for the 12 cut to be a 12 on video. It was never a 15.
One of the nice perks about HD home entertainment is that it’s cheaper to reclassify works than to make alternative versions in that format – so stuff like Temple of Doom and Attack of the Clones go through as uncut 12s because its not worth the fuss – and catalogue titles being rated 12 makes so little difference compared to a cinema release being rated 12 (before the 12A) and cutting out half the target audience.
Movies would often got higher ratings on home release, not necessarily because the certificate wasn’t approved for home viewing but because if there was a potentially “disturbing” scene a higher rating would be given because it could be viewed again and again and again and warp those fragile little minds. Stupid, but true.
12 hadn’t been approved for home video ratings yet, so for the first year (at least) all 12 movies ended up as 15 on VHS
I think the 12 was introduced for home viewing in mid-1994 – I think Ace Ventura was, if not the first, at least one of the early 12s on VHS. Some 12 certificates were cut slightly to get a PG at home, though I can’t think of any off the top of my head – going to a 15 was pretty much the default. As it costs money to reclassify films most have remained at 15 for home video as the studios see little point in changing it. It surprised me to see Gremlins 2 was now a 12 on blu-ray as I’m not sure why Warners would go to the effort to have it reclassified.
I certainly never paused and rewatched Jamie Lee Curtis in Trading Places. Nor, in a hypothetical scenario which now seems absurdly of its place and time, Emma Thompson in The Tall Guy.
I only know Erik the Viking by reptutation, but I think watching it with a parent could be even worse than the time my dad sat down and said, “Whatcha watching?” in the middle of Evil Dead.
He was strangely unimpressed that a film he’d taken his 11 year old son to the cinema for started off with a rape joke.
I dunno the hype around the film seemed bigger than who was appearing in it. Tim Curry would have been just as batsh1t crazy as Jack in the role, while John Lithgow could have been equally fun in a probably more hammy way.
Jack Nicholson as the Joker might just be the most perfect casting choice in history. There’s obviously quite a few character actors that could have killed the role. (My choice would have been a young Willem Dafoe.) But Nicholson was one of the biggest stars in the world and he had a body of work built on infamously off-kilter performances and a real-world larger-than-life bad boy persona. All that baggage lent itself so well to the Joker. Getting Nicholson definitely shined a spotlight on the film and piqued general public interest in it in a way that I think a less famous actor probably wouldn’t have done. Plus getting a major star like Nicholson probably made the studio more open to letting their young wunderkind director spend pallets of cash to make something truly new and original. Without Nicholson, who knows what we would have ended up with.
Rewatching this for the first time in ages. Was first in line when I was 13. It really is mostly a triumph of set design. And 44-year old me is absolutely delighted watching Jack Nicholson. He’s having so much goddamn fun—sure he’s so charismatic that it nearly breaks the movie, but who fucking cares, because he also makes the movie.
Curry or Lithgow would have been great as the Joker, but I think having Nicholson would have been the difference between getting it on the cover of People Magazine before release instead of just in it, or leading off Entertainment Tonight instead of just a later segment.Although I think it’s fair to say the movie had a ton of business through the summer, and it wasn’t just an opening weekend flash in the pan, so other stars may not have hurt the eventual gross that much. It got a huge amount of word of mouth praise that wasn’t really about Nicholson.
I’d have paid to see a Tim Curry Joker at his prime, but I mean, Nicholson really does just kill that role. He’s amazing.
Yeah…the merch surrounding Batman was also a spectacle unto itself. I remember the cereal with a giant Batman head piggy bank shrinkwrapped on the box. There were the shirts, and even things like stickers and buttons became temporarily hot due to Batman as I remember what I believe were the hero and villain pin sets tied to the movie. Also, as noted by many in this thread a moment in movie history when folks actually sought out a novelization of the film and even if it was read prior to seeing the film it did not take away from ones enjoyment of the film. When Batman film button sets became hot collectibles that briefly became a cool thing to trade with among your friends for other Batman merch you were looking for, or something people briefly would pay more than the MSRP for at things like comic conventions, well that is when you know the film had become a phenomenon.Going back to novelizations, I did things in reverse with Howard The Duck, as I believe I saw the film first than read the novelization. If the novelization was well done I bet even a film like The Sixth Sense would have still been a fun watch knowing the “twist” ahead of seeing the film because you already read the novelization.
I believe that I saw Batman on opening weekend (or maybe its second week) in theaters at the North Hollywood cinema which at the time was a cool theater for folks who lived in the Valley (I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, Pacoima) to go see a film. I was with my brother who could drive but I am not sure my sister went with us (at the time I was 17, my brother would have been 20, and my sister 14 but probably had her own interests).ETA: I see you are in the U.K. so mentioning North Hollywood does nothing for you, fair enough. For those of us in Southern CA living in the Valley I got the vibe at that time from my older brother that the No Ho theater was a cooler theater to hang-0ut at versus some of the theaters that were more local to where I lived.
Ha, that’s right, I had one of them Batman-head piggy banks that came with a box of mediocre cereal for years.
That Howard the Duck novelization is a woefully underrated classic
Agreed. It’s just weird.
I have that Howard The Duck novelization. It’s odd to say the least.
Not to mention the logo was one EVERUYTHING. They must have sold millions of t-shirts that didn’t say “Batman” on them anywhere, just this:
THAT is the Batman logo*. I don’t know what DC keeps playing around it.*I know it’s not the original, but still…
I remember Grant Morrison’s notes on I think Batman Inc., saying that Morrison made sure the artist used this logo on Batman’s latest re-design because as Morrison rightly noted its one of the most advertised, merchandised, promoted, and recognizable logos in pop-culture. Why would you waste all that cultural cache? (even if I must admit my preferred logo is the angular black bat with no color/surrounding logo on a grey chest).
Learning how to draw this just right was a very important part of being a 7-year-old.
Learning how to draw this just right was a very important part of being a 7-year-old.
It was also important practice for becoming an edgy middle schooler a few years later:
Lithgow has a lot of range as well as talent — latest case in point, he was compelling as a lion-in-winter Winston Churchill in The Crown despite being almost a foot taller and a good bit skinnier than the real thing. I’m sort of imagining his never-happened Joker as his 3rd Rock from the Sun character, only murdery.
Or like Dr. Emilio Lizardo/John Whorfin minus the ridiculous accent.
Yeah Dick Solomon but crazier is exactly how I imagine his Joker would have been.
“Mirror … MIRROR!”*terrified plastic surgeon hands Joker the mirror*“Oh my God … I’m GORGEOUS!”
I think the casting of Jack was huge in its credibility. It wasn’t just some corny-ass throwaway silly Batman project when a prime JACK GODDAMN NICHOLSON was stepping into the most famous comic book villain of all time. Now it became a must-see event to not just the DC fans.
This is still the Gotham City aesthetic that I think most perfectly captures what Gotham “should” look like. All the statues of muscular men pulling levers and “glory of labor” aesthetic, but rotting down. Sort of an amalgamation of the Rust Belt cities fused with Diego Rivera and communist propaganda. What a genius piece of stagecraft, and one that’s pretty accurately preserved in the Batman ride at Great America
I think my main issue with Gotham is that while it looks great, it’s obvious that it’s a set. It doesn’t do a very good job of hiding the limited size of the stages very well. We see the same city block in what seems like a dozen times, especially the movie theatre area.
I actually love that Burton’s Gotham doesn’t look real. It just adds a further layer of oddity to the whole thing. Like the Christmas tree scene in Returns… it’s so clearly indoors, but it somehow works for a movie as insane as that.
I compare Batman 89’s backgrounds with Brazil’s. It’s fake, but it’s really good fake.
The problem is the style is so exaggerated, I’m not even sure you could make it realistic since you wouldn’t even see a reasonable facsimile in real life.
I would say moreso on Batman Returns. At least Batman had the sense to keep most of its run time in various interior sets to limit Gotham’s exposure. We caught just enough of it to wonder at it’s design. Returns, by contrast, if I remember, took place largely in Gotham and it felt like the entire movie was filmed in the same city square, save for the sewer scenes with DeVito’s Penguin.
This is my favorite style in any movie ever.
Watching the movie today, it’s not hard to imagine that Anton Furst’s production design is a bigger star than either Michael Keaton or Jack Nicholson. Despite the fact that a billion superhero movies have been made since Burton’s Batman, despite the fact that this isn’t the best Batman movie—heck it isn’t even the best Batman movie by Tim Burton—there’s just something unique about the world Burton created here, and so much of that goes back to Furst’s production design. There are certain films where the “texture” of film—sights and sounds—are more important than plot and characters. I would put the ‘89 Batman in that category.
It’s amazing how they managed to continue and deepen the feel of it in Batman Returns too. Crime ridden though it is, I still want to live there
I know, right?
“heck it isn’t even the best Batman movie by Tim Burton”Hell fuck yeah. Until The Dark Knight, I always said Batman Returns was the best Batman movie out there.
Some of us still think it is 🙂
It still is, but I upvoted anyway.
Batman Returns is and always will be the best Batman movie for me.
heck it isn’t even the best Batman movie by Tim BurtonWat
Batman Re2urns!
I think there are two reasons to talk fondly about the original Batman: one is the production design, and the other is the title. It’s a perfectly serviceable movie, but the miniature work and sets are much, much, much more interesting than the parade of explosions, double entendres, and awkward fistfights that unfold in them. I’ve enjoyed plenty of Batman movies, but I think the 1966 version should get more credit for having an authorial point of view that isn’t “people sure deserve to have their asses kicked.” The campiness allows Batman to express some real generosity of spirit.
“They may be drinkers, Robin, but they’re also human beings.” Batman 66 remains the best Batman movie.
Oh man, Robin’s mini-tear about the evils of Drink is one of my favorite parts of the movie. Also, more superhero movies should have a climax where fifty dudes wrassle on a giant raft. And at a certain point, most of these movies have plot points as silly as the villain buying a nuclear submarine secondhand from the Navy using a PO box, they just try to make it seem plausible.
Sold to P.N. Guin! I love how Batman is so full of contempt for the military guy, there’s zaniness but then there’s just being a damn moron.I remember loving the big sub fight at the end when I was a kid but now I think it’s the weakest moment in the movie, it’s very lackluster in its action. And yes, action is not why anyone is watching this, but it drags. The scene where Bruce Wayne kicks the shit out of everyone in the sub earlier is much better, West is murderous there and there is a giant springboard of doom.
Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!
Yep. Returns with Bo Welch as production designer was a MASSIVE step back; every set blatantly looked like an artificial soundstage.
I think they took a lot of inspiration from Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire in terms of the city look
It’s kind of weird how the two Burton movies are still, to this day, the only two live action movies that present Gotham as a fictional city with its own unique history and architecture. Schumacher’s Gotham is totally incoherent, with no sense of geography or style beyond putting neon lights on everything. But Nolan does something even less imaginative, and just shoots on location in Chicago and NYC, with almost no attempt to even block around real-life landmarks, much less add memorable fictional landmarks. When Bane blows up the “Gotham City” bridges, Nolan doesn’t take the opportunity to give the Brooklyn Bridge a CGI makeover, or erase the under-construction Freedom Tower. Snyder surprisingly tries even less, to the point where it’s revealed in Batman v. Superman that the big fight in Man of Steel flew between Metropolis and Gotham, with absolutely no visual distinction between them.Also, our cities have gotten so clean and safe that it’s hard to imagine any of them actually needing a Batman. The 89 movie nails it in just the first five minutes.
Agreed. There are tons of ways to integrate that Gotham feel into Chicago (though I thought the Gotham police station was damn close), and it was definitely a bit of a letdown to see Chicago just chopped up and used wholesale
The one instance I really liked of Nolan’s repurposing of bits of Chicago for his Gotham City was in Batman Begins when the Chicago River drawbridges are pulled up to quarantine “The Narrows” area from the rest of Gotham. Otherwise, yeah, while it was fun to see recognizable locations, it kept Gotham from having its own aesthetic. It was also disappointing that Gotham has very little visual continuity among the three Nolan films. Begins at least adds in that elevated monorail running through the city, but it seems to have disappeared in Dark Knight, which more or less just looks set in modern Chicago. And then of course with Dark Knight Rises largely shifting location shots to NYC and Pittsburgh, there’s basically no consistency with the Gotham of the first two movies.
I think Gotham looks the best in Batman Begins, it looks like a distinct city. The Dark Knight Rises is the laziest version just look like the cities they were shot in , with very little effort into disguising it. I actually really dislike TDKR because to me it seems like everyone involved was just lazily phoning it in.
And then of course with Dark Knight Rises largely shifting location shots to NYC and Pittsburgh
There’s a shot somewhere towards the late middle (I think when Bane’s plan starts to go into action) of lower ‘Gotham’ that’s really just Battery Park in NYC with some bits removed, and some the bridges from Pittsburgh grafted on, that’s extraordinarily distracting, mostly just because of familiarity with the real area. All I see are the missing bits and my office building.
It’s especially weird in that the plot of Begins and TDKR are both, in different ways, reliant on the geography of Gotham. Begins shows us that most of Gotham City is on the mainland, with the Narrows being a small island separated by a drawbridge. TDKR’s plot requires most of Gotham to be on a Manhattan-like island that can be isolated from the outside world by blowing up all its bridges and tunnels.Both things can’t be true for the same city.
I *loved* the geography they created in the first one! and then it was like, “Fuck it, it’s more or less Chicago.” “No, fuck that, it’s New York.”
Here’s my argument that Nolan is actually pretty bad at establishing a fictional place, where the best (only?) example of him creating a place from whole cloth is that area in Inception where you can get sucked in for eternity if you’re not careful, and even then is fairly humdrum compared to other spots. Otherwise, he’s pretty happy taking existing scenery and just throwing a movie on to it.This is an oversimplification, but he just needs his scripts and a scaffold to stage them on; he doesn’t really give a shit about “place”
Respectfully disagree. I think a lot of Nolan’s sense of ‘place’ was not only borne of the necessity to not be the Schumacher movies, but also just the choice to make most situations at least somewhat familial. The masked goons in the opening scene actually have conversations and motives; the crime bosses meet in a basement with cheap fold-out chairs and church bake sale tables pushed together. Most notably, it makes a point of taking place largely in the daytime, which was new to ‘gritty’ Batman’ and also served as both plot point and visual. People rip on Batman for being a weird-voiced dork, but that’s the point this time. He’s not supposed to be the cool one in this movie.
I’m not sure how any of the above supports the idea of Nolan developing a place to anywhere near the extent that the Burton Batmans did
Your argument, though, was that he doesn’t care about ‘place’ at all. It’s okay to disagree, obviously, but my argument is just that Nolan’s movies were informed definitively by breaking from the past, and a more realistic Batman universe needs a more realistic Gotham. While I would say that Burton’s movies are superior to Schumacher’s (RIP), they both have a distinct sense of ‘place’ enough that any child could tell the difference on basic visuals alone. Nolan’s were just more localized and less reliable in flair than in context, is all.
Snyder surprisingly tries even less, to the point where it’s revealed in Batman v. Superman that the big fight in Man of Steel flew between Metropolis and Gotham, with absolutely no visual distinction between them I think Wayne had employees in Metropolis and he flew there during the events of Man of Steel. But to your point, Gotham and Metropolis are still indistinguishable from each other.Speaking of Metropolis, you call out Nolan and Snyder for their lack of imagination, and Schumacher for his incoherence, but I think the directors of the live-action Superman deserve an equal amount of criticism for failing to portray Metropolis as a City of Tomorrow. I started reading comics right after Brainiac 13 reformed Metropolis into a futuristic city, and in Superman: The Animated Series Metropolis did not look like a normal city. So maybe it’s not fair to say that Metropolis has “always” looked like a futuristic city, but I think that’d be cool to see on film. I can forgive Richard Donner for not having the tools to do anything remotely resembling that in the ‘78 movie, but not for lazily using shots of the New York skyline and landmarks and calling it Metropolis (directly inspiring Nolan’s portrayal of Gotham). Bryan Singer used Sydney, Australia to stand in for Metropolis, but other than a CG Daily Planet, he doesn’t really do anything to make it stand out. And as you already pointed out, before Batman v. Superman, Snyder failed to make Metropolis look remotely interesting in Man of Steel – probably because he just tore it all down at the end of the movie.
Maybe it’s just residual nostalgic affection, but I actually love the way Metropolis was just 1970s New York, right down to bums yelling nonsense at Superman and people carrying around giant radios on their shoulder. It’s a nice time capsule, if nothing else, and a great contrast to Reeves’ corn-fed Clark Kent who seemed to have stepped out of a Mr. Peepers episode.
It just feels odd to me given that Donner’s whole ethos for the film is “verisimilitude.” Even as a kid, seeing what was so recognizably New York being called “Metropolis” always took me out of the film. I used to go down rabbit holes of thought, like, “Well maybe it IS New York, and they just call it Metropolis” or “Maybe he flew from Metropolis to New York because he’s so fast.” But upon rewatching, those theories never really held up.The bums yelling nonsense at Superman and people carrying around giant radios on their shoulder never took me out of the film. I didn’t associate those things directly with New York and I thought it just added flavor to the city. I love those bits too. “Saaaaay Jim, that’s a bad out-fit! Whoo!”
Wouldn’t verisimilitude mean showing a realistic, grim ‘n’ gritty city to contrast Superman’s comic-bookesque persona to, though?
I guess I’m not being clear. It’s the establishing shots where Superman flies past very recognizable NYC skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty that takes me out of the film, not the depiction of a realistic, grim ‘n’ gritty city.
I just assume that in their universe, the city consisting of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and that other one was named Metropolis instead.
and that other oneLOL at your negging of Staten Island
I just assume that in their universe, the city consisting of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and that other one was named Metropolis instead.
*Reeve’s
Donner blatantly included glamour shots of the World Trade Center and Statue of Liberty, so it was worse than just not having the tools.
I think Metropolis in Superman Returns is such a non entity, aside from a couple of establishing shots, the majority of the movie feels like an empty backlot, just a step above Lois and Clark.
For me, tbh, Metropolis in any of the live action Superman movies, stretching from Donner to Singer to Snyder could be boiled down to the Daily Planet. Nothing else in any of those movies had given me pause to even think about the city of Metropolis. It was just wherever Superman/Clark happened to be doing his thing at the time.
STAS also benefited not just from being animated but also made by the same people behind BTAS, the latter carrying over the same design sensibilities from the movie of a dark, worn gothic-meets-constructivism city whereas Metropolis exudes bright and colorful deco futurism.
Your last paragraph touches on something I’ve been sort of thinking about off and on recently. I think it would be interesting to see a version of Gotham City that isn’t some kind of crime-infested hell hole, which is a portrayal that’s sort of a relic of the period in the 70’s and 80’s when Batman was becoming more “modern” and happened to coincide with a period of urban decline. In the real world, Gotham City would probably be a rapidly gentrifying place with gleaming skyscrapers, pretty plazas and pedestrian malls and skyrocketing rent. You’d have to reconsider villainy in that sort of environment – more corrupt corporate executives, fewer street-level thugs and criminals running rackets. But I think there are some interesting stories to tell in that context.Alternatively, you could write a story with an older Batman who started his mission at a time when Gotham was a blasted urban hellscape and suddenly finds himself 20 years later trying to fight crime in a shiny city that’s not facing the same problems it once was. Just, you know, do it better than Zack Snyder would.
Yeah it was something I only really thought about when I was showing my kids Batman 89 the other day. I grew up in NYC in the 80’s and remember when certain parts of the city were “scary” and it felt like some lowlife could pop out of nowhere and mug you at any time, even though nobody in my family has ever actually been mugged. Batman 89’s opening sequence brought me back to that time period, and I realized just how dated that depiction is compared to what NYC looks and feels like now. But Gotham kind of has to be a scuzzy urban hellscape full of street crime in order to justify having a Batman, something that Nolan never quite reckons with by focusing on mob bosses, crooked cops and supervillains rather than street crime. Snyder never shows enough of Gotham to even raise these questions.But it would be super interesting to see a Batman movie that takes place in a gentrified Gotham, where injustice and police brutality is commonplace, but street level crime is almost non-existent. There’s a way more interesting story to tell there in a thoughtful way (i.e. the opposite of Snyder “modernizing” the Daily Planet newsroom with a throwaway line about blogs).
Maybe part of the result of Batman cleaning up the city was that a lot of the old street crime situation died out, but supervillains became their own whole problem, even if you’re probably not in too much danger from them if you’re a civilian. You want to get involved, put on a crazy getup, otherwise you’re in more danger of being blown up by standing near a significant piece of public art if Batman doesn’t solve a puzzle in time than being stabbed by some mugger in an alley.
Fans (And possibly DC, I’m not sure) have tried to get around this by saying Gotham is not actually an analogue to New York, but to Camden or Newark, cities which are still rotting and not turned into a playground for the rich.
I think Frank Miller is largely responsible for the whole “Gotham as crime-ridden hellhole” thing. “Batman: Year One” and “The Dark Knight Returns” were super-influential. But your comment about a gentrified Batman reminds me of that Calvin & Hobbes about superheroes fighting more realistic villians: “Quick! To the Bat-Fax!”
In this version, Two-Face is a crazed property developer.“I’m going to flip this coin. Clean side, your neighbourhood gets an exciting new pedestrian precinct, a few boutique shopping areas, and a revitalised community centre. Scarred side, I turn it into a concrete strip-mall with insufficient parking and where the only restaurant is an Arby’s.”
Re: In the real world, Gotham City would probably be a rapidly gentrifying place with gleaming skyscrapers, pretty plazas and pedestrian malls and skyrocketing rent.That’s the vibe the Chicago-cloned Gotham has in the CW’s “Batwoman” series. It’s squeaky clean shiny AnyCity USA. Quite a jolt after the decrepit, retro noir Gotham of the Fox network’s Batman origins series “Gotham”.
I think the Netflix Daredevil show is the answer to the question about updating Batman for today. Hell’s Kitchen is shown to be gentrifying and it’s Kingpin who’s driving those changes. He even appeals to the public, like a politician, to justify the changes he’s making. There’s no line where Kingpin ends, and the government of New York City begins. Even in prison he’s given privileges above all the others, and is merely biding his time until release. The only thing which ruins that arc is introducing the Hand, which at least tries to show them as a crime syndicate with some of the political ties and appearances of legitimacy that Kingpin pulls off so well, but then…well, Black Sky is introduced.
Alternatively, you could write a story with an older Batman who started his mission at a time when Gotham was a blasted urban hellscape and suddenly finds himself 20 years later trying to fight crime in a shiny city that’s not facing the same problems it once was.I’d love to see that take on Batman. Basically Bruce Wayne beating the shit out of the assholes he has to do business with every day.
As much as I’d like to see Batman tossing around a bunch of corporate stooges and hipster d’bag tech and real estate moguls, it would also make for a far less interesting and entertaining movie.
Also, our cities have gotten so clean and safe that it’s hard to imagine any of them actually needing a Batman.Give New York a couple more years of the current political scene, we’ll be putting up a Bat-Signal on every tall building.
Yea – I love Nolan. But I did get mad when suddenly it switched from Chi to NY. Fake one or fake the other. Don’t fake both.
A lot of Gotham City was based on the dirty rotten New York City of the 70s and 80s. Real life NYC cleaned up a lot since then and I think a lot of adaptations want to keep with the GC=NYC representation. But I think it works better if Batman stays in a fictional city that’s rotten and corrupt all over. (Yes I know Gotham is a nickname for NYC, but I don’t think that’s binding.)
I’d say that the Narrows in ‘Begins’ have a real sense of character. It looks like an older part of the city that got left behind as the rest of Gotham got richer, so it’s still as cramped and dingy as it was when it was catering to far fewer people. Which makes it perfect as the starting point for Ra’s al Ghul’s rampage: it’s exactly the kind of place he’d look at and say, “This is beneath the dignity of man.”
I’d say Nolan is the antithesis of Tim Burton both as a writer and director. Nolan’s Batman was focused on high concept, what it meant to be Batman, what inspires people, Bruce Wayne’s faith in the people of Gotham that makes it worth fighting for but generally keeps production design at minimal and that goes for most of his films or at the very least, make it look like it was shot on location. Sure they may add some cool mind-bending CG effects afterward but at the end of the day, it looks like Gotham was shot in Chicago with no attempt to appear otherwise.Burton’s Batman, while pretty simple in story and didn’t really have a message, he used Batman to build yet another gothic dreamland that pulled the audience out of their seats for a fun and twisted 2-hour ride, permanently burned into your memory, easily quotable years/decades later.I loved TDK but I can honestly say, that entire movie hinged on Heath Ledger’s brilliant, yet maddening performance as the Joker. I can’t really remember anything from any of his Batman movies. Burton’s Joker may be just Jack Nicholson hamming it up as Jack Nicholson but there’s so much more to his movie than that.
Yeah, it’s telling that the cartoon jacked Furst’s style completely a few years later (and were right to do so).
One thing that’s struck me on rewatch in the last few years is that the 1989 Batman may be a little “darker” but it’s just as campy and overstylized as the 60s version. The sets and production are amazing in this but I’d love to see a list of how many movies tried to ape its style in the 10 years after (and most of them failing, including the non-Burton Batman sequels.) A lot of them were properties that really never should have gotten the watered-down-Tim-Burton treatment but were properties someone happened to own like Dick Tracy or even Super Mario Brothers so they forced that style on them anyway.
No Gotham City has ever looked more right than the opening two matte painting shots.
I love the style of the set design here, and the Animated Series from the 90s definitely wore its influence on its sleeve. The design in Dark City also seems to be a less cartoonish version of Burton’s Gotham, a little more noir than Gothic but still full of grime and steam. Keaton’s Batman would be right at home there.
This is as good a place as any to share these amazing BTH set photos taken after Batman (1989) had wrapped shooting in Pinewood Studios – great shots of what the actual sets looks like which I don’t believe has ever been shared at this length: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/2hm5mr/three_fans_explore_an_empty_gotham_city_backlot/
I read somewhere that the idea for Gotham was what New York would look like if it had grown up with no zoning or environmental laws.
I always figured Nicholson’s Joker was the inspiration for the character Donald Trump played during the 2016 election.
He’s a combo of Penguin and Max Schreck.
Trump definitely sees himself as Batman.
Hey, speaking of Back to the Future 2.
Trump giving away free money?
…so magnetic that crowds of people risk almost-certain death just to hang out around him
Yeah, but you can almost sort of relate to people finding the Joker charismatic.
Joker had bigger crowds. 😉
“When you’re a celebrity, they let you do whatever you want. I go up and rub another man’s rhubarb, I don’t even ask first.”
This is a great article. It really crystallizes that feeling that Something Had Changed that summer. Our local paper used to do a summer movie preview special edition and I still remember them derisively dubbing that summer “Season of the Sequel”. All through the decade, the number of tentpole blockbuster movies out that summer had gradually been amping up. In the early 80s you ceded that ground to Lucas or Spielberg and then fed off the crumbs, but 1985 seemed like an inflection point where studios said fuck it, we’re gonna go for it ourselves. But 1989 really seems like the first years where EVERYTHING out that summer was a big event and for the most part (coughcoughGhostbusters2cough), they delivered. I’ve been listening to the late lamented 80s All Over podcast, and imagining them talking about this year and this summer in particular makes me mad all over again that they pulled the plug.Finally, for 1987 I commented on the unusual number of hard R movies came out that summer, and already here two years later we see that phenomenon beginning to dwindle away. I think the nail in the coffin comes in 91, with the decision to make Terminator 2 PG-13 instead of R like its predecessor.
Wikipedia tells me that T2 was rated R.
I only noticed that as I was looking for examples for a comment I made elsewhere about differences between UK and US ratings system.
What??! Goddamn, you are right. I have a distinct memory of me and my friends fretting that they had softened the rating though. What the hell. Welp, there goes my dissertation. >Tosses 300 page book in fireplace that’s burning in June for some reason<
It was rated R, but it was deliberately softened. This had less to do with “ratings” than with the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger was becoming an gigantic star and was intentionally trying to soften his image going into the Kindergarden Cop/Twins phase and I think he was especially trying to distance himself from the cop killing villain that he played in the first movie for the sequel to get a wider audience.
Yeah, T2 was R.That’s why I had to go see Bill and Ted’s 2.STATION!!!**Blows brains out.
Yeah, T2 was the first R rated movie I ever saw in theaters.
Yeah, T2 was still R, it’s just that a ton of kids saw it anyway. But that certainly was a factor in “Last Action Hero” deliberately going for a PG-13. The game changers for PG-13 turned out to be “Jurassic Park” in ‘93 — and I hope that’s brought up when this column reaches that in a few months — and to a lesser extent “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” in early ‘94.
Oh, I miss ‘80s All Over so much too. Actually, Drew McWeeney did an extended essay about the live-action movies involving the Joker last year, including the most recent take, and it can be purchased at this Pulp & Popcorn site. (https://www.80sallover.com/pulp-popcorn-stuff/jokers) His take on Batman ‘89 is interesting — basically, if this article sees Nicholson’s performance as for the better, he sees it as for the worse, feeling it’s just too big for the room to be what it needs, to be good.With ‘80s All Over, I liked hearing how odd May was for much of the decade. Although they stopped just before a pretty lively May ‘85 (“Rambo”, “Fletch”, “A View to a Kill”, etc.), looking “ahead” it’s clear that it wasn’t until the late ‘90s that May as a whole became as big a deal as June/July, or even August some years. In the ‘80s there were usually one to three potential tentpoles in the back half of May, and the rest of the month was a wacky grab bag (i.e., until “Last Crusade” rolled in, May ‘89 was yielding up stuff like “Miracle Mile”, “Earth Girls Are Easy”, and “Road House”).
I understand the reason why they stopped, but man, just a month or two more and they could have ended with THE 80s movie, BTTF. It’s agonizing they didn’t get there.
My heartbreak was they didn’t get to the greatest August ever, August ‘86. So many films to celebrate or hilariously tear apart: “The Fly”, “She’s Gotta Have It”, “Manhunter”, “Howard the Duck”, “Shanghai Surprise”, “The Transformers — The Movie”, “Flight of the Navigator”, “Friday the 13th Part VI”, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2″, “Stand by Me”…
Yeah, I loved when you’d discover, Holy Shit, that month was AMAZING for movies. Like realizing ET, Blade Runner, and The Thing all came out within a week of each other, or the month in 81 where Superman 2, Dragonslayer, and Clash of the Titans all came out. I left off at another humdinger: March 1984.
Oh God Road House was amazing. Shirtless Patrick Swayze taking breaks between Tai Chi sessions to knock some heads together. Everyone in town obsessed with Patrick Swayze (villainously or romantically), and rightly so.
T2 has enough body horror and weird shit that it deserves its R. A lot of R movies from the 80s, in todays lens would have been PG-13 if they came out today. Even movies as last at the end of the 90s probably would be different today. The Matrix is a prime example. I think because of its dark pallet and heavy subject matter it got an R rating but its a bloodless movie without that much profanity. Sure it has a ton of gun play but is it any less “violent” then Avengers Endgame? All sorta leads to the point that ratings are bullshit anyways and studios can manipulate results if they want. As a parent, the wife and I learned a long time ago that you need to consider every movie on its own instead of blanket ratings. There are good resources out there, like common sense media and IMDB family guides that can help you decide on a movie. Those are bias to but they usually at least do a good job pointing out anything anyone would find “questionable” and you can use them to make up your own mind.
I believe the ultimate deciding factor for the first Matrix was the point-blank “Dodge this” head shot Trinity delivers to Agent Smith. I imagine that if it had been PG-13 they might have had to cut around some of the other action a little, but I think they said that particular moment guaranteed an R rating.
I honestly can’t recall if I saw T2 in the cinema (I would have been 15-16 at the time) but I know my dad rented it on VHS as soon as it came out and we both loved it. Said it in other comments, but I appreciate the fact that my dad trusted my own judgement very early on (or he just didn’t care) and as long as my mom didn’t know (which I’m sure she did, but…) he would let me watch any/everything if I thought I could handle it. Which is probably why I still love Excalibur (watched at age 5) and Highlander (age 11). To bring it full circle, Batman was the first film I ever saw 3 times in the cinema. To say it was a cultural phenomenon is putting it lightly. I was 13/14 when it came out that summer of ‘89, and the marketing blitz was over and beyond. It is infinitely quotable. Somehow they managed to have the right actors in all the right roles (as the article points out, Jack Nicholson as the Joker? Really? and Keaton as Batman?). But it all worked. All through the ‘90s and ‘00s I probably watched this at least once-twice a year.
Yeah I saw Excalibur when I was really young at a sleep over. Highlander I remember seeing vividly on HBO. One late night I couldn’t sleep and was in the family room flipping channels alone when my brother came home for the night. I had to be around 10 so he was 18. He sat down right when HBO said Highlander was on next. I went to change it and he was like “No, it’s awesome you have to watch it.“. 2 hour later and he was proven right. One of the few bonding moments I have with my brother. We were not and still aren’t very close.
I find it funny that TV and movies are what bond my family together. We have so little in common, even when I was growing up, but I still remember my dad being just as excited as my decade older sister and I when ST:TNG first came out. I was in middle/high school during its run, and she still made a point of coming over to the house and watching it with my dad and I every Saturday night. I seriously hope they find a way to clone Sir Patrick Stewart. Hell, him, Sir Ian McKellan, and Christopher Plummer need to live forever (I also did not know that Plummer was Canadian!!).
Man, I miss Drew and Scott on ‘80s All Over. What an excellent concept for a podcast.
Last year Batman also gave us another spin off with Gregg Turkington as The Joker. His car — the Mobile VFA — poisoned many with carbon monoxide. The Joker strikes again!
I recall going to see the early matinee showing at the downtown theatre, and then driving past a few hours later when the 7 pm show was beginning and seeing the line around the block. My first taste of actual movie hype, so 12 year old me was impressed. Also 89 was one of my busiest theatre going years, at least 2 movies every month all summer. Batman, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, No holds barred….it was glorious.
Yeah, it was a busy summer for 11-year-old me. We saw “Batman”, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”, “Ghostbusters II”, and the “Peter Pan” reissue multiple times apiece, plus one-offs with “Licence to Kill” and “Uncle Buck”. (“Last Crusade” and “UHF” we caught up with on video. I still haven’t seen the former start-to-finish, but my little brothers had that on all the time for a month or two.)
Ah shit I forgot about License To Kill, one of the only Bond films I’ve seen in the theater. Good call. I just remembered Star Trek V too. holy crap that year may have shaped my entire p-cul existence.
“Heath Ledger’s version of the Joker is the one that’s come to loom larger in the cultural memory.”And, though everyone overlooks it, it basically owes everything to Nicholson’s Joker.
This town needs an enema!
I like to pretend that Ledger’s Joker is Nicholson’s reincarnated. Like he fell off the tower, then woke up in a new reality and said, “ok… got a little too silly that time. We’ll keep it light this go-round, but let’s focus less on Prince and more on knives.”
That makes sense haha!
Never rub another man’s rhubarb!
Don’t know if this is true, but I remember reading years back that the studio executives saw an early cut of the film, thought it was crap, and so decided to throw an obscene amount of marketing dollars at it in hopes of generating a massive opening weekend before the bad word of mouth spread, thereby establishing another key part of the template for blockbuster films going forward — the focus on generating massive openings.
My memory of this (aged 26, and a big comic fan) was incredible excitement followed by huge disappointment. Messy action, the plot MIA, and Keaton never convinced me (although you could blame the costume, which was plainly as restrictive as hell).Loved the sequel, though.
I haven’t seen either of them in a long time, but I’d definitely place the sequel ahead of the original one. The effects are better, the Penguin is a more interesting villain, and Keaton gets the occasional chance to be funny. That said, the production design of both movies has been copied to death, and Batman Returns in particular is… much. I don’t even know if the visuals are interesting, but they’re certainly overdesigned and underlit. Also, as a kid I remember being frustrated by the movie-ness of movies like this one (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles also springs to mind). There are stunt performers laboring under heavy costumes in dimly lit master shots. There are looong car chases and people getting kicked into piles of boxes. Those things make the movies seem earthbound in a way that cartoons or comics books aren’t. There’s also a need to justify the material to the audience – like including scenes of Batman getting shot to satisfy the snarky assholes in the audience who wonder why people in this fantasy universe don’t just shoot him. To be honest I don’t really care for the way superhero movies have over-corrected by becoming self-indulgent live-action cartoons. Especially in the last five or six years it seems like MCU movies are still trying to prove themselves as Serious Entertainment, rather than a decent way to sink a few hours.
Given the results, I refuse to believe Ackroyd and Ramis labored over the Ghostbusters II script.Damn, that was a really weird summer for movies. A Star Trek flick, a Bond movie, and a mega-budget Cameron offering all got stomped.
Tbf that Bond should never have been released in the summer.
Bond belongs in the autumn…..sorry ‘Fall’.
At the time they were always released in the summer. Although that was the last to be released in the summer, if I’m not mistaken.
I love License To Kill but I can understand it underperforming, especially in the context of these other movies. Pairesta talks above about the PG-13 aesthetic taking over and LTK is some brutal shit.
Yep. It was a bit disorienting when it was first released. Living Daylights was basically a Moore movie without Moore, and then along comes this thing that features a chase with tanker trucks but also has Bond setting the villain on fire.
Not to mention Bond just chilling and watching the airlock scene go down. Or anything involving del Toro, for that matter.
Leiter in the shark tank scene scarred me when I was a kid at the theater. LtK is bar none the darkest Bond film to date (well, I haven’t seen Spectre, but I think LtK would still take it). That could be because of it’s place between the Moore and Brosnan Bond’s, but I don’t see myself going back to watch it to confirm. Heh.
I skipped it at the time. “Octopussy” was the first I saw in the theatre and it was really exciting – the shit parts didn’t bother me, even with them it was a Bond movie like I’d only seen on television: exciting, glamorous, beautiful exotic women, great music, etc. Then “A View To A Kill” utterly infuriated me lol. Then came“The Living Daylights” and I thought, well, that’s over (not that it’s bad, just not what I wanted at the time). But they picked up again.
*Aykroyd
I can believe Aykroyd labored over the Ghostbusters II script and then Ramis made him cut out the extensive side plots about psychic aliens and cross-dimensional possessions.
So instead we got pink goop and an ambulatory Statue of Liberty controlled with a joystick. Lateral move.
How is that any weirder, dumber, or campier than a giant marshmallow man?
GB2 isn’t as great as the first one, but it gets a lot of unnecessary flak.
The marshmallow man stuff is funny. The Statue of Liberty stuff is treacly.
Some movies lend themselves to sequels but Ghostbusters was lightning in a bottle. Seeing the group form and fumble their way into a profession that was intended, initially, as a sort of opportunistic scam gave Murray, Aykroid and crew a chance to parlay their comedic sensibilities into something new.Ghostbusters 2 essentially just rehashes everything from the first and by then the magic was gone. I did like the idea that since they captured all the ghosts and saved the city in the first Ghostbusters, they had literally put themselves out of a job and became a joke, appearing at kids’ birthday parties.
You’ve neglected to mention the other out-sized “first” accomplishment Batman achieved. Prior to its VHS release, the studios had a stranglehold on home video pricing, and new feature films all retailed in the 90$ range, to support the rental industry (and their cut of that).Batman was the first major Hollywood feature release to be sold initially at a “sell-through” price of 29$. It was such a novel event that stores even sold pre-sale ‘reservation’ certificates; I got mine at the Jewel grocery store in Lombard!Just in time for Christmas!
Yeah, “Batman” and then “The Little Mermaid” getting to VHS as quickly as they did, and for sale at that, was pretty unprecedented. “Little Mermaid” pretty much changed the Disney business model — up to that point they didn’t release their new animated features to VHS in favor of slowly bringing out the back catalog titles, because they were still heavily reliant on the theatrical reissue market. “Mermaid” was too big a hit not to capitalize upon right away. It didn’t make all the bank that Batman or Indiana Jones did, but it was a movie that people genuinely loved in a way no one had anticipated.
I still recall a full page ad taken out for either Raiders or Return of the Jedi (it was definitely a Lucas film), late in their theatrical run, the gist of which was “this is your last chance to see this film, because it will NEVER be released to home video”. Liars.
Right. Both movies actually had reissues in April ‘83 and summer ‘85, actually, before they finally got to video — that was still common practice in the ‘80s.
And then they re-released it in theaters on or near its tenth anniversary, which also served to promote DVD sales.
Specifically, the 1997 rerelease was to counterprogram Fox’s Anastasia. (Disney did a VHS reissue afterwards, but didn’t enter the DVD market in earnest for another 2 years.)
Yup, I’ll never forgive Disney for that. Granted Titan A.E. that followed was troubled from the beginning and while I admire its ambition, it falls well short of greatness. That said, I wonder if Anastasia would’ve performed better if Disney hadn’t pulled a runaround and maybe Fox wouldn’t have been so quick to shut down its feature animation branch.I’d consider Anastasia among the best of Don Bluth’s films, though, right alongside The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and The Land Before Time. Great design, great music and songs and you can’t go wrong with Angela Lansbury.Bluth has always struggled under the shadow of Disney. An American Tail and Land Before Time came at a time where Disney was in a slump and had the backing of major Hollywood powerhouse, Steven Spielberg. After Little Mermaid, it was downhill from there.It sickens me that Bluth’s films still haven’t had a proper Blu-Ray remaster. Most of which are just direct video transfers with slight sound tweaking or minimal upscaling. You’d think Spielberg himself would have a vested interest in remastering his Amblin films.
It was also a movie with endless re-watch appeal for parents with small kids. I liked Batman, and probably owned the VHS. But I didn’t need to rush out to buy it, or watch it multiple times a week.
I remember going to a Hollywood Video in the mall to pick up a VHS of Star Trek: Generations for my folks (good son over here, spending allowance money on a Christmas gift instead of the arcade next door). The proprietor said he had one copy under lock and key because it was $100. Blew my mind, I was used to the $19.99 stuff at Wal Mart, but it was so soon after being available to rent and that’s just how it used to work.One day, I’ll tell this story to my kids and I may as well be talking about wearing an onion on my belt.
i worked at a videostore and it was always really awful to be a nebbish 17 year old having to tell an angry customer than replacing iron eagle 2 would be $120.
No price is too high to preserve national treasure Lou Gossett, Jr.
My friend had an experience like that with Natural Born Killers. It had been out for a bit, so it wasn’t at the $90 brand new level, but the video store charged him like $40 to order it for him. Then a few weeks later the price dropped to that $20 range and was available everywhere. I think the store called him and offered a refund, but his sister answered the phone and was pissed at him, so she didn’t give him the message until months later.
That’s the most 1992 story ever
I completely forgot about VHS tapes being locked up until just now.
Star Trek: First Contact is where I learned the same lesson.
I vaguely recall there was some kind of major cross promotional tie in too that was used to justify the lower price. If I’m remembering right, that was fairly new.
I remember having to mail order a Batman action figure with a grappling hook belt from a catalogue, which took 8-12 weeks to be delivered. I was 7 and by the time it came, I had forgotten I ordered it.
Would that be the Jewel that’s on the other side of the parking lot from Enchanted Castle?
I kinda hope it was Mr Z’s. The only family owner grocery store I ever stepped into. Was sad when it closed.
LOL I put that detail in specifically to see if anyone would mention it, but yes, that’s the very one! I’ve been shopping there since the Long John Silver’s was there (Culvers now)- damn I miss that
The White Castle in that shopping complex was a frequent destination for me in high school. Good times.
I remember my local video store having older VHS cases on the shelves that still had $90 or $100 price tags, but I assumed those prices were for “rental” copies rather than “home” copies. The idea that movies on VHS just cost that much is wild.Sort of like when I found out that video games cost more during the NES era than the PS1/PS2 eras.
As preposterous as it seems now, I saved up my lawnmowing money for a summer to buy a copy of Dreamscape on Beta.
I remember the days of $90+ VHS movie prices, and also remember getting a VHS copy of “Wayne’s World” from McDonald’s as part of some new meal promotion. How quickly things changed!
I remember having to rent Beta tapes at Circuit City. Video rental stores weren’t really a thing yet.
Damn, I wish I still had all those movie posters.
I think Top Gun was priced below $30, thanks to the controversial decision to sell a Pepsi af before the feature.
It’s an interesting result of both phenomena, the Batman commercial juggernaut and the changes in the VHS consumer market, that my parents had the 1989 Batman movie on home video at a time in my childhood when they owned absolutely nothing else that was remotely as gory or violent, as my mother had no stomach for it, we kids were too young for it, and my father watched very little television at all. Everyone bought something with that Batman logo on it.
I was in college at the time Batman came out and I remember seeing it in the theater in June, then buying it on VHS around Thanksgiving, then watching it on tape in the dorm room.Back then, it was beyond-unheard-of for a movie to be released for sale that quickly. Like other people are saying, movies were usually released at rental prices for a few months and then made available for sale.
I was working at a video store at the time. Our strategy for new release films was to buy a ton of copies at the $89 MSRP (that’s about $200 in today’s dollars) and rent the hell out of them for the first month, and then sell off the most-rented copies at $20 after they had more than paid for themselves. It totally changed the math when a new copy only cost $10 more than a worn-out copy of other films.
I remember walking into Target and seeing a towering endcap display loaded with the black Bat symbol-emblazoned VHS boxes— They had clearly just put them out that morning. I was entranced. I was 11, and had no idea of the release schedules of home videos— so I was completely blindsided. I dug in my heels and begged my famously-cheap mom to buy one and somehow, inexplicably, walked away with a new copy. It’s still one of the all-time great, pop culture retail coups of my childhood.
It’s nicely serendipitous that Tom has reached 1989, and therefore Batman, the same week that Michael Keaton has said he is in early talks to reprise the role for a new DC film.As I said in the comments on that article, I quite like that idea. In particular I think Bruce Wayne should pepper his pep talks with accidental TLC references.
first movie i remember seeing in the theatre. had the batman converse all stars. what a time to be alive.
I was 16 when it opened. I had the posters of just the bat symbol and another one that was a schematic drawing of the Batmobile on my wall. I had t-shirts, the comic adaptation, and the soundtrack (the Danny Elfman one, not the Prince one). I was fully into the Bat-mania even before the movie opened. And even I was amazed the night we saw it, when the girl at the box office handed out with each ticket a brochure with lots of exclusive Bat-merchandise for sale. I remember Bomber jackets, jewelry, and signed memorabilia all for sale at a premium. Never seen anything like that before or since, even 4 years later when Jurassic Park took over the world.
I have wondered about the art gallery dance scene for a long time and why everyone is moving like that. Either they shot it without any music and told the crew to just pretend *something* was playing, and dubbed the Prince in later, or this was a bunch of actors with the worst sense of beat and rhythm in the world, or both. It’s funny, but I can’t believe it was meant to be funny in that way.
I always loved the bit about Joker saving the Francis Bacon, too. I think a director with a weaker sense of art would have gone for a dumber joke, like having him save one of Warhol’s bad portraits.
They shot it with an existing Prince track – I want to say “1999,” but don’t hold me to it. . .
I mean, it is all white dudes.
I wasn’t allowed to see Batman in theaters (I was 9), but by the time it came out on video (which my parents did let me rent on release day), I knew all the characters and most of the scenes and plot because I had collected all the trading cards. Trading Cards. For a movie. And they were insanely popular. I seem to remember one Harvey Dent card being particularly valuable (“The New DA” IIRC), but maybe that was just a rumor. Those were the days…
Dumb story time: Batman was my first midnight movie. It was the summer between my 8th and 9th grades, and the theater was close enough that my parentset a friend and I go get in line at probably 8pm to wait for a screening. The whole time, and I mean almost literally the whole time, my friend kept going on and on about how he’d seen Star Trek V earlier that week. He described the entire movie in detail, and assured everyone in earshot that no matter how good this Batman movie might be, they hadn’t really lived until they’d seen the new Star Trek, which he was positive was going to be the biggest hit of the year. Again, this is Star Trek V we’re talking about.
Here’s my dumb story: I was same age (between 8th and 9th grade). My friend asks if I want to go to the movies in the next town over. We go and his plan was to meet up with a girl from another junior high who we were about to be in high school with and she brought a friend… a really good looking friend. They decide to see Dead Poets Society. I told them to enjoy their movie, I was going to see Batman. Missed opportunity? Maybe at the time. In hindsight, hell no.
You, sir, made the right call. Dead Poet Society is even more overrated than Batman, and teen makeouts are nothing to fondly remember.
I tend to remember movies from that time period by who I was making out with at the time. And then I think to myself now, thank god kids aren’t as deliberate about that now – or maybe it’s just the stadium seating.
They decide to see Dead Poets Society. I told them to enjoy their movie, I was going to see Batman. Missed opportunity? Maybe at the time. In hindsight, hell no.
Given how Dead Poets’ Society ends, I can’t help but think you might have avoided the most awkward makeout session ever. If you told me that a Marvel supervillain’s tragic backstory apexed at an awkward dry-humping that, er, concluded at the end of DPS, I would think to myself “ . . . Yeah, that checks out.”
You know, I rewatched Star Trek V recently for the first time since, I’m pretty sure, 1989. It had its bad moments (and its very bad moments), and made some dumbass choices, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d remembered, and had some good moments too. I didn’t regret the two hours spent. I was pretty surprised by that.
I had to cool my friend down before his wedding, we had like three hours to do nothing while we waited to head over, so I brought the DVD and we watched this.You forget A) how great Nicholson is and B) how many people he kills in a PG-13 movie!
I just rewatched the first three movies this past weekend, and boy oh boy do the first two hold up (I couldn’t even IMAGINE the BDSM intense sexual psychodrama of Batman Returns ever being made today). And I had a thought, which lines from all three first movies kinda leaned towards. It seems on first viewing that Joker killed Batman’s parents – he has a memory of it….but what it seemed more like to me is that Batman views ALL criminals as having killed his parents, and thus his memory is really more of a blank face with a gun, and he just fills it in with whoever he’s after at the moment. When he confronts the Joker about it, the Joker seems a bit bewildered, but then cops to it…but how would he know that he killed Batman’s parents amidst all the likely people he’s killed…he doesn’t know Batman was that kid!The evidence to the contrary is the video in the article – Bruce Wayne clearly remembers the “dance with the devil” line. It’s all up for interpretation, but that was just my thought after this viewing.
Also, it’s weird that no one seems to know who Bruce Wayne, scion of the most important family in Gotham is in the first movie, but by the second movie, Donald Trump’s non Penguin half (because both of them together are obviously Trump, and I believe Burton even said so around that time) Christopher Walken needs Wayne money to make his power plant, so he’s obviously well known by then.
Batman Returns was definitely made at a time when you didn’t have to have much continuity between films. If it wasn’t for the exchange between Bruce and Alfred about “letting Vicky Vale into the Batcave”, BR would have been essentially a stand-alone film.That all ended shortly after Batman Returns, when sites like Ain’t It Cool gave the internet actual influence, and people realized the fans actually noticed and cared about that stuff (probably too much, but that’s a different argument).
Unfortunately, no one mentioned any of that to George Lucas when he wrote the prequels.
This was the first summer movie season I have any memory of. I was too young to recall any before this, so it’s weird to hear that “1989 changed everything” when I have no reference point for what “everything” was before then. What I do remember is that I had a BALL that summer, going to tons of movies with my family and friends when before then I think we maybe saw one movie a year? It seemed like this was the first summer when people around me were really hyped about going to the cinema. Maybe it was just a glut of sequels, but people LIKED that. They still do.
And damned if I didn’t see half the films on the top ten list in like a four-week period. As a little kid I probably shouldn’t have been watching that guy turn into a skeleton in Last Crusade or all the random Joker murders from Batman, but oh well. What I most remember about Batman was when we left the theater; I was vibrating with excitement thinking it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, and my dad, far less enthused, just said, “Why weren’t there any jokes?”
“Superman: The Movie had been a huge hit a decade earlier, but the ensuing sequels had been progressively crappier and less successful”Um, Superman II would like to have a word with you.
Superman turns his back on humanity because he’d rather get laid, and he takes petty revenge on that trucker (which is even worse in the Donner Cut, seeing as how the original encounter is erased from existence). Movie is terrible.
Superman wants a normal life with Lois. It’s a pretty universally praised movie.
This was the first movie I ever saw at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood (then known as Mann’s Chinese Theatre after Mann Theaters changed the name in 1973). I was 16, and really had no idea what to expect. I think it was one of the first places I ever drove on my own, as well, having gotten my license and my first car about two months before it opened in June of ‘89. I remember marveling at just how BIG the screen was. I’d never been in a theater of that size and scale before, having only seen movies in my tiny little local places with screens that were dwarfed by that of the Chinese.It’s still a fun movie that hasn’t necessarily aged perfectly well, but that barely matters. This movie stomped on the terra, man. It absolutely changed the landscape. This movie was IT that summer. You could not swing a dead bat around by the tail and not hit a theater showing this movie. And not only that, the merchandise was everywhere. I had the shirt, the hat, all of it. I don’t remember wearing either of those things to the screening, but knowing my dork ass, I most likely was.And that impact lives on, too. I went to Wondercon a few years back, and the cosplayers of the day showed up fully decked out as Joker and his goons. Outfits, hats, boom box blasting ‘Party Man’, all of it. They made their entrance into the con hall in the very same style as Jack and his goons had while walking into the museum, and the place just erupted. So cool.
“And that impact lives on, too. I went to Wondercon a few years back, and the cosplayers of the day showed up fully decked out as Joker and his goons. Outfits, hats, boom box blasting ‘Party Man’, all of it. They made their entrance into the con hall in the very same style as Jack and his goons had while walking into the museum, and the place just erupted. So cool.”
Ha, that sounds great.
Trading cards were still big back then, and I remember trying to collect as many of the Batman ones as possible to try and piece together what the movie would be about.
I was also 16 in the summer of ‘89. What a perfect time to get a driver’s license and enjoy the movies. Batman was at the recently opened (and now closed) Temple City Edwards theater. I saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at the massive 70mm theater at the (now closed) Pacific Theater in Pasadena. And my favorite movie experience of all time was that year, watching the re-released “director’s cut” of Lawrence of Arabia at Universal Citywalk. That summer cemented my love of moviegoing, and I really hope the theaters can reopen soon.
Good memories. I saw The Dark Knight at the Udvar-Hazy Center’s IMAX screen outside of DC back in 2008, and it was like you were actually in the film. That very first shot of the skyscraper exploded onto the truly gigantic screen, and my sister sitting next to me leaned over and said, ‘It looks real!’ And it did.
The IMAX footage from Hong Kong, with the camera panning down from the city’s tallest building. Wow! Hold on to your seats!
My favorite bit was the Tumbler/truck chase through Chicago. That shit was bananas.
“It’s still a fun movie that hasn’t necessarily aged perfectly well, but that barely matters.”This right here. It’s very interesting that this was considered (at the time and to 10 year old me) a “dark/gritty” film, but having seen it now after the Nolan Trilogy, I think it’s the closest to Adam West campy Batman that we’ll probably get (though naturally wearing the makeup of Burton’s gothic flourish).Someone (can’t remember if it was an author or someone in the comments) tried to imply that the Schumacher films were that kind of camp, but I had to disagree, since they weren’t tonally consistent enough to even really be considered camp.The Burton one’s however? Incredible camp, especially through the lens of modern films. From Joker’s face reveal, to shooting his boxing glove gun at a TV, the entire Museum scene, the long gun taking out the Batwing, etc all the way through to Penguin (and his carnival goons) to Schreck and Kyle’s resurrection as Catwoman (being awoken by stray cats) and her commitment to acting as much a feline as possible.
It’s all so ridiculously over the top, but entirely consistent within the world that’s been crafted between the visuals and score.It’s great camp fun, in my opinion.
Very well put on all fronts. If campy Batman is your thing, you can’t ask for much better than Batman ‘89. It’s a perfect combination of the darker side of the characters and the garish silliness of the TV show.
Yeah yeah yeah, Jack Nicholson as the Joker, iconic, charismatic, whatever. You know who was actually getting shit done while the Joker got all the credit? Bob, that’s who. Steadfast, competent, willing to follow the boss to some very weird places. A true goon. Tracey Walters plays him perfectly too.
Call me crazy, but I still say “Check his wallet” lands better than any other joke in the movie.
I always liked the “You’re My Number One Guy” callback.
When I hear that I can only think of Hot Chip’s “Ready for the Floor.”
That might be my favorite line in the whole movie.Oftentimes I’ll grab and rub my wife’s shoulders and say, “And remember… YOU… ARE MY NUMBER ONE…”She hates it.
“Bob, gun” works best for me.
“Bob, gun.”[Bob obediently hands it over; BLAM]“Gonna need a moment alone, boys.”
Props to the screenwriter on that one. First time I saw it, did not expect it. Should have. Didn’t.
I have an older cousin who loved this movie just as much as myself, and this was our go-to line if we were ever in an uncomfortable situation. It helped that his name was Robert, although he went by Rob. It always worked, especially in awkward church situations (we were more than a bit religious in the 1990’s, myself, not so much anymore).
Damn shame about that. Bob had been with the Joker since he was part of Jack Napier’s crew in Carl Grissom’s mob.
Jack would have been taken out by Eckhardt at the start of the movie if Bob hadn’t had his back. Truly, the goon’s goon.
“He’s also wildly charismatic. The Joker is a known murderer who killed a mob boss in broad daylight in front of cameras, and he’s also a suspected terrorist in possession of chemical weapons. But throngs of Gotham citizens still clog the streets when the Joker shows up to throw money from a parade float. Nicholson makes this seem vaguely plausible, at least within the movie’s skewed reality. His Joker is so magnetic that crowds of people risk almost-certain death just to hang out around him (also, to grab some free cash).”You know what else makes this seem vaguely plausible? America in 2020.
It’s why the obviously stupid giant wall in Pacific Rim holds up as a believably “Yeah, actually people might go for this” plot point.
I think a thing that cannot be given enough credit for Batman as a phenomenon in 1989 was the brilliant, omnipresent ad campaign for it. An instantly iconic zoomed-in view of the bat-logo chestpiece (with a bunch of specular highlights, because it was 1989 and Kai Power Tools was a thing), with nothing below it but the release date:…and the damn thing was everywhere. Every single vertical surface in every major city was plastered with the damn thing. Entire subway cars were covered with it. If they could have bought space on the side of the Empire State Building, they would have. It instantly said: this is an event. You will be in a movie theatre on June 23rd or you’ll be making lame excuses to your friends about why you can’t and they’ll laugh behind your back.I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it before or since, and the only phenomenon I can compare it to was the omnipresence of “X” hats in the run-up to Spike Lee’s Malcolm X a few years later.
The omnipresence of the Batman phenomenon is a great thing to point out. It’s even a gag in Gremlins 2’s Bat Gremlin, who even escapes the lab leaving a perfect cutout of the above Batman symbol in the wall like a cartoon, and then finally being turned into a gothic gargoyle after trying to hassle Dick Miller.
That symbol was SO omnipresent that year that a bunch of the ‘two direction’ street signs in my hometown were vandalized with spray paint to look like the bat symbol.
Did that happen anywhere else, or was that just a weird quirk of Modesto, Ca in 1989?
Yes! This happened in my neighborhood too. When we had friends over, we would take them on a walk to see the Batman tagged street sign. Everyone loved it.
I definitely remember Batman street signs all over NE Ohio at the time.
This is so true. I don’t remember when it was, but I definitely remember seeing that poster for the first time and getting actual chills. It was well before the movie came out, and those days it was unlikely to hear a lot about upcoming films, so I didn’t know a Batman film was even in the works. Like you said, the moment I saw it I knew where I was going to be on June 23. I don’t know if that level of prerelease excitement generated so simply will ever be replicated.
It was also a case where the comics shop world got in on the marketing very early — retailer catalogs were loaded with Batman gear, and there was a several week period where comics shops had a good lead on the mass-market stores for several kinds of merchandise (as discussed at https://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/1989/1989-06Diamond.html).
Comics movies don’t often help comics sales, but that was a time it definitely did. You can pretty much mark the early 1990s boom to June 1989; it would be just a few months before DC would release its Legends of the Dark Knight title to over a million copies sold, setting off (inadvertantly!) the variant-cover wave.
I remember when Slash from Guns ‘n’ Roses started wearing a Batman logo shirt…really made it seem like it had broken through to every part of the culture.
Holy substitutions! He’s wearing a knockoff!!
Unless my memory is playing tricks on me (I haven’t seen this since it came out), there’s also a really weird reference in Natural Born Killers. When we meet Juliette Lewis’s terrible family, who’s supposed to be like a nightmare version of everything bad about middle America so we won’t mind if Woody Harrelson slaughters them, she has a kid brother who seems fairly normal except that he’s got something very much like a black Batman logo painted over his entire face. As a kid in 1989 when that logo was everywhere, that did seem like the next logical step.
I went with my mate at the time, had my dad drive us to the theater – first movie I saw without parents. Sitting, there, munching on popcorn, watching the intro scene where the camera is flying around a maze… no, it’s not a maze… it’s the BATMAN LOGO… omg is this gonna be good… a moment I have yet to forget.
It is really hard to explain to people who were not alive yet what the summer of 1989 was like. The Batman logo was on everything. The old Adam West show was on one channel or another nearly constantly. Every mall and auto dealership was hiring a guy in a Batman costume to sign autographs for kids to get parents in. It was insane and its probably the single piece of pop culture that shaped 11 year old me the most. Without Batman, I may have never picked up a comic book and more importantly discovered my local comic shop. From my local comic shop I not only discovered my love of comics, I discovered my love of reading and I found my next big(and still big) obsession in table top gaming(back in the 80s and 90s a lot of comic stores were also your FLGS. Plus TSR advertised the shit out of D&D in comic books). Even my love of cult movies was born as I got older and went to different comic stores and found a cool local one that sold and rented cult movies. Without Batman 89, I may not have discovered my love of Cronenberg, Lynch or Scott. Or Anime or Hong Kong Cinema. Batman 89 shaped the 42 year old film loving, literature loving, gaming loving, comic loving nerd I am.
The media synergy with the comics was amazing, too. The “A Death in the Family” storyline, easily the comic book story that had received the most mainstream media coverage of all time to that point (and to this day probably only outshined by the Death of Superman) had come out only a few months before.Batman really was everywhere.
I will give the Batman movie credit for spawning the Animated Series, which came out around the same time as the X-Men cartoon, which got me interested in the giant pile of X-Men and Batman comics my brother left behind when he went to college. All of that said, I owe a lot more of my pop culture vocabulary to the Chicago-area UHF station that played Night of the Living Dead on Halloween night. I saw it when I was about 12, and it wasn’t “scary” on the level of Candyman or Event Horizon (ah, the 90s). But the idea that such a violent, nihilistic, unsettling movie was made in black and white in Ye Olden Dayes of the late-1960s fundamentally changed my idea of what cinema was.
Speaking of the animated series why isn’t it on HBO Max. I enjoyed watching it after school as a kid and wanted to rewatch it.
“Speaking of the animated series why isn’t it on HBO Max.”DC is still trying to make their streaming service happen.
The B-52’s “Love Shack” is one of those rare songs that I remember where I was and what I was doing the first time I heard it, and it’s entirely because when they get to the “Bang bang!” part, I assumed it was another song riffing on Neal Hefti’s “Batman” theme and turned up the car radio to hear it more clearly. “Batman” really was EVERYWHERE in 1989.
I don’t know if anyone else remembers this, but one of the reasons why so many people were so hyped to see this movie was the first theater trailer. There were rumors of the movie coming out, the casting was known, but our only reference points for the character (for most of us not into the ongoing comics scene) were the Superfriends and Adam West.As I recall, the first theatrical trailer was done on the fly midway through production. It had two scenes in it – Batman’s rescue of Vicki Vale from the museum and Jack Nicholson’s line, “Where does he get his wonderful toys?”, and the rooftop scene where the petty crook screams, “Who are you?!” and Keaton grabs his lapels, pulls him close, and mutters, “I’m Batman.” That’s how it ended. Through it all, there is no music (it hadn’t been completed yet). All you had was Nicholson and Keaton, one really awesome stunt, and the sight of that amazing rubber suit (which, remember, was a completely new take on Batman’s look at the time and gobsmacked us all).I still remember the yells in my theater from the fanboys when Keaton said, “I’m Batman,” largely because I was one of them.Also, Last Crusade – Sean Connery is the best part of this bar none. “You didn’t bring it, did you? YOU DID. I should have sent it to the Marx Brothers!”
“His Joker is so magnetic that crowds of people risk almost-certain death just to hang out around him”
Say, that reminds me of something that happened in Tulsa just a few days ago.
11-year-old me lived and breathed Batman that summer. Everything. The novelization, the Taco Bell tie-ins, everything. Later when it came out on VHS (as someone else in the comments noted, it was one of the first movies to come out on VHS immediately priced for consumers), I saved up allowances, got it, and watched again and again.
Side note/hot take on other 1989 movies mentioned: BTTF 2 and The Last Crusade remain my favorite entries in their respective series.
I suspect others will disagree, but the most important thing this movie did was paving the way for Batman: The Animated Series, with its definitive portrayal of Batman (and, for me at least, The Joker).
Everybody has that one movie that they will love forever, regardless of the passage of time or how they change as a person. 1989 Batman is that movie for me.In the summer of 1989, I was 11 and had to have major surgery. I was in full leg casts and using a wheel chair for five months (my casts were very heavy, and moving me in and out of the house was very difficult). I mostly stayed in a hospital bed in my living room all day. The one time I went out all summer was to see Batman. My parents knew I was big into Batman and comic books, and they were not going to let me miss it. It took a lot of effort to get me out of the house and set up in the theater, but they got it done.And-it was everything 11 year old me wanted, for a lot of the reasons already discussed in the comments. It is such a rare feeling to have your lofty expectations fully met by a piece of pop culture (even if we can recognize the flaws today).I will remember that day forever-it was wonderful. And then my brother and I wore out the VHS for years after that. We had every line memorized, and were familiar with every beat of the fantastic soundtrack. Just writing about it makes me feel good.There have been much better movies since-Dark Knight is even a better Batman movie. But my affection for 1989 Batman is unconditional, and persists to this day.
Batman was huge, and this article really gets into that. I was an 11 year old Marvel True Believer at the time. Never read one Batman comic, but even I was excited about the prospect of a darker Batman then the cheesey 60’s version that everyone knew. The one that teamed up with Scooby-Doo from time to time. That symbol was everywhere. That ridiculous Prince song was a damn hit. And I was watching Batman in a drive-in theater absolutely loving it. everything written here echoes my feelings out it, from the performances to the sets to the music. Nicholson will always be my favorite Joker. He’s a true clown mugging for attention. His henchman killing is random the way Joker is. As it Mr. Breihan says it’s all nonsensical in way that I love. And that Elfman Score. Oh how it evokes such strong feelings in me. I’d listen to that thing over and over again as pre-teen.As for the rest of the movies mentioned. Sequels all, they might not have been great or even as good as the originals but, barring Ghostbuster II they are eminently watchable films even to this day. I’ve seen Last Crusade more times than I can count. And back in the Basic cable days I would come across Back to the Future II a lot and always end up watching it. I don’t think I’ve seen that movie more than a handful of times front to back, but I’ve seen pieces and parts of it, edited for television dozens of times.I mentioned somewhere else recently that 1989 was great year for movies.
Superman: The Movie had been a huge hit a decade earlier, but the ensuing sequels had been progressively crappier and less successfulHow dare you demean II and III! IV, I’ll give you, though…
Watching them again recently, III may be worse than IV in some ways
To be fair, I haven’t watched them in quite some time. III is just bananas–a moneymaking scam involving siphoning fractional amounts off transactions! Richard Pryor! Fake Kryptonite made using cigarette tar! Superman going nuts and splitting into two separate personae! That perpetually-frustrated souvenier vendor at the Tower of Pisa! Other things I can’t remember!–that I kinda forgive just how objectively awful it might be. That and the fact that the “lady merges with computer” sequence freaked the hell out of me as a kid.
That sequence was horrifying! If the movie had more of that, it might have been more worthwhile to me. Beneath all the corniness (Richard Pryor accidentally skis off the side of a building) is some edge that I was into. Evil Superman is the film’s saving grace, but there’s not enough of him. I also liked the idea of going back home to Kansas and a rekindled romance with Lana. The movie had ideas.
But so did Superman IV, which has some messaging about nuclear war, a great talking point for a hero who so often is trying to save us from ourselves. My biggest wish was that they changed “Nuclear Man” to be an established baddie like Doomsday. (Ironically, both this and BvS use Lex Luthor’s experiments to create their villains). Unfortunately Quest for Peace is undone by a shoddy production company that was going out of business, and didn’t put any care into the film they were making.
Doomsday’s first appearance was 92, a good five years after IV, so that wouldn’t have worked.
Good point.
Batman has an undeniable place in history. I just wish we’d stop pretending it’s a good movie.
It’s a good movie, but it never quite feels like a Batman movie. A re-watch a couple years back had me thinking that it was a straight crime thriller hastily re-written to be a Batman movie. The parts (Nicholson, Keaton, Elfman’s music) are definitely greater than the sum.
I still maintain that 1989 Batman is perhaps the platonic ideal of putting a comic book on screen.Okay, maybe it hasn’t aged perfectly. Maybe the plot has holes that a tanker can be driven through. Maybe it doesn’t make A Deep Important Philosophical Statement About The World. It doesn’t reflect the world as anyone has ever lived in it. It doesn’t have the benefit of a small nation’s GDP-worth of computer special effects and resources to play with. It doesn’t transfer the characters to the screen with flawless-to-borderline joyless reverence for the original source material, or consciously attempt to take it apart piece by piece in order to point out why Your Childhood Heroes Actually Suck And You’re A Stupid Baby For Ever Liking Them. But goddamn, I insist that it is probably the closest someone has gotten to being able to take the OTT stylised imagery of comic books and putting them on screen without going too far into Campy-Town and still making an entertaining movie in the process.
While I think that crown belongs to Dick Tracy (though yes, it technically isn’t a comic book), you’re for sure right that after decades of slavish adaptations* it’s somewhat refreshing to look back on this and see just how much it picks and chooses what to keep.*Give or take Warner Bros/DC movies, which only think they’re being faithful.
I think Indiana Jones must be one of those franchises you imprint on like a baby duckling when you see your first installment as a child, because I saw Last Crusade first and I still to this day love it just a smidge more than Raiders.
It’s true. Temple of Doom was my first, so that probably explains that
I saw Temple first, my last time going to the movies with my mom (she was horrified by the heart-removal scene, and refused to accompany us after that). Last Crusade is my favorite Indy movie, and I still remember that glorious 70mm experience. I might have a different opinion if I was lucky enough to watch Raiders in the theaters.
There are certain unforgettable movies that I would give anything to have seen in theaters at the time, and Raiders is on that list
There’s a scene in The Last Crusade that illustrates why great schlock is an art form all its own.It’s that moment in the big tank chase at the end of the movie where Sean Connery drops into the tank trying to rescue Marcus Brody, only to have the evil Nazi commander immediately follow him and interrogate him about Connery’s Holy Grail journal. He keeps slapping Connery with his glove, and Connery eventually snaps, grabs the guy’s hand and says, “It tells me that goosh-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them.”And it’s such a perfect scene. You have the actor playing the bad guy totally committed to being a slimy, loathsome villain. The choice of physical abuse is perfect – slapping a prisoner with your glove is both evil and kind of prissy, so the bad guy comes off as utterly contemptible. And you have Connery, who, of course, is making no effort to hide his Scottish accent, but still manages to totally sell the character’s righteous contempt for the bad guy and everything he stands for with a wonderful little bit of sneering dialogue.
Pretty sure that Henry Jones Sr was supposed to be a Scottish character?
Damn, so many movies to talk about this year.Licence to Kill – Dalton’s best Bond movie? I find Living Daylights a bit more “fun”, but on rewatching Licence really does a great job of presages the “grim-and-gritty” elements of the Craig era that everyone fawned over without quite throwing away all the things that make Bond movies fun the way the Craig movies tended to do. Underrated. Dalton should definitely have done more. Plus, I mean, a guy gets stuffed in a decompression tank, I haven’t seen that in a Craig film yet. Points for ballsiness if nothing else. Ghostbusters II… either this or BTTF III was the first movie I saw at cinemas, so I have a sentimental soft-spot for it based on that alone. It’s not as good as the original by any means, but it’s great for entertaining kids who’ve been gorging themselves on the cartoon, which is really what it’s mainly trying to do if we’re bluntly honest. Nostalgia alone makes me put this over 2016.Lethal Weapon II – better than the original? Is that a hot-take? ‘Cause, I mean, the original is a justly iconic and groundbreaking film, but I just love this one more. Plus, the villains are just so much more unique and interesting (and one of the villains in the original was Gary Busey, so that’s saying something). Making them “Seuth Efricans” was an inspired choice.
Two movies that year featured characters getting killed via decompression. One was a James Bond movie and one was an Alien knockoff underwater. You’d be so surprised to find that the more elaborate and disturbing death was in the Bond movie. (The guy’s skull expands like the dude from Big Trouble in Little China and then, sploosh. Yikes.)
It also leads to one of my favorite “after the kill” jokes:“But what about the money?”“Have it laundered.”
As a teenager who’d been paying close-ish attention to movies for a few years at this point, the level of hype around this movie was so big and so intense I couldn’t relate it to anything, even wrapping up the Star Wars movies (so far as I knew) six years earlier. Nothing could possibly live up to it.
To this day I don’t know if that level of hype has never been surpassed, or if I just got used to it.
I was born in 1988 and this is the first movie I distinctly remember watching (on video in 1990). I probably haven’t seen it in 15 years but it feels hardwired into my DNA. I still remember the weird Diet Coke commercial that they included on the VHS.
YEESSSSS!
WTF? You had to sit through an ad to watch the movie you already bought, for buying more stuff via catalog from the studio, which you order from a 900 number??
Ah, those were the days 🙂
I still don’t understand why so many people dislike Temple of Doom. I’ll fully agree that it’s culturally problematic by today’s standards, but I mean sh*t, we’re talking about a series of movies that could basically be retitled “Archaelogical White Savior.” It’s got the best score of all three films, and between the bug room and the heart scene (the reason the PG-13 rating exists, thanks to Spielberg’s constant pestering of the MPAA), 10-year-old me loved everything about it.
The first movie I ever saw as a midnight screening the day (or more accurately, night) it was released. Good times.
1989 was the best year for movies. fight me.
(note: I wrote this before and deleted it I think so apologies if it appears twice)
So, a few months ago I bought a box of 1980s’ magazines from a bookshop and among those magazines was an issue of a fan magazine called ‘Comics Interview’ from 1989 which was devoted to the then-unreleased but in production Batman film. What I found particularly interesting was that basically every interview subject is so down on Keaton, reading their real-time impressions in retrospect was kinda fascinating:
Sam Hamm, Scriptwriter: “I feel Nicholson is great… (on Keaton): I’m taking a wait-and-see approach.. Michael Keaton is certainly not the way that I ever conceived of the character…”
Steve Englehart, 70’s Batman author whose stories influenced the film: “I don’t buy it. I parrot the line everybody else does, which is that Keaton is a pretty good actor but I don’t think he’s Bruce Wayne.” (He then goes on to say an actor I don’t know but that who played ‘Dex’ on “Dynasty” is considered the perfect Batman casting)
Those are just two but there’s a lot of that.
Dex Dexter guy as Bruce Wayne? Thank god nobody ever asked Steve Englehart for casting advice.
Can we also give Batman credit for being the inspiration for Batman: The Animated Series? The Gotham City in that cartoon is basically Burton’s vision brought to life. Mark Hamill’s voice over of The Joker is very close to what Nicholson brought to the character. Also The Summer of 1989 gave us Do The Right Thing. That is a glaring omission.
I want to say Lego Batman is the best Batman movie, but then I found out that Steve Mnuchin was an executive producer. I cant watch it anymore knowing that douchenozzle is making money off it.
His Joker is so magnetic that crowds of people risk almost-certain death just to hang out around him (also, to grab some free cash).Who’d have thought that 30 years later it would work as a political metaphor?
Fun fact: the original line was supposed to be “I’m Batman motherfucker.”
Batman Returns is a better movie, it’s endlessly rewatchable but the OG Batman is a huge nostalgia piece and an instant classic. I was 8 when this came out and I fell in love with it instantly.Warner Bros did a huge disservice trying to create a goofier cartoony world so they can sell mcdonalds toys, sure they made money but the movies were horrible and seemed to be a precursor to future WB Management interference in superhero movies to make them less dark and ruin it
I didn’t love too many movies more than “Batman” when it came out in ‘89, when I was a pretty damn callow 17-18 year old.
Watching it ages later? Yeah, it’s clunky as hell, but it still works because Tim Burton of that period was so damn good at letting us into his weird worlds, and he was able to surround himself with people (Nicholson, Keaton, Basinger, Elfman, Furst) who were really damn good at their jobs too.
The best thing about this movie is all the different ways Joker kills! Guns, quills, gas, poisoned cosmetics- This is a Joker with quite a high body count, and he’s full of clown-y gags like the fake teeth, detachable hands, and acid flowers. My favorite is the electric buzzer. He’s a cackling maniac throughout the picture, and thus, Jack’s Joker is the best and truest to the source material in my eyes.It’s interesting to me that Warner Bros./DC have desperately tried to recreate Donner’s Superman, but haven’t done the same with Burton’s Batman. This is the version imo, with stuff like the best Batmobile and the best costume (it seriously wouldn’t be hard to tweak these things to be more functional today, while maintaining the same designs), and it’s the only version of Gotham that could comfortably be home to any Batman villain without the dreaded worry of it feeling “out of place.”Even the music is damn near orgasmic. Why can’t new films evoke Danny Elfman the way new Star Wars stuff still evokes John Williams?
It says something to me that the best Bat-media to come out of this was The Animated Series, because it wisely took cues from this film. We could have kept doing this! Batman is at his best fighting gangsters. There’s a distinct era where that fits. Don’t be modern, be timeless. I get that everybody want’s to author their own take on the dark knight, but Tim Burton has created a usable world here that just hasn’t really been tapped to its full potential. Honestly, if DC were to announce that the next batman movie takes place in the Burton-verse, that would be the coolest news to me.
* Michael Keaton was a great choice for Batman and set the standard for serious versions of the character as much as Adam West set the standard for spoofs and satirical takes. But Alec Baldwin is just as intense and talented an actor and really looks the part of Bruce Wayne. At the time I believe Keaton was actually the bigger star, but it still mystifies me — given Burton’s penchant for using some actors repeatedly — that neither Baldwin or Geena Davis have ever worked with him after Beetlejuice, because both would have fit well in his Batman universe.* While its a common assumption that Nicholson as the Joker was just adapting the nihilistic, sardonic persona he had crafted throughout his career, there’s a lot more to his characterization. His Jack Napier is a riff on the traitorous henchmen found in many gangster and noir films of the 30’s and 40’s, most notably imo the vain, scheming lothario who conspires with the girlfriend of James Cagney’s gang boss in White Heat. One can also see that he is mining the gothic horror and drama characters from films from the silent era through the forties, like Nightmare Alley, Freaks etc., to inform his Joker.* In many ways, Prince was as effective and influential a Joker as anyone who as attempted the role, even though his venue was music video and he was obviously a better performer than actor. No one understood better that Cab Calloway, Little Richard, James Brown and Jimi Hendrix — influences Prince would show here and elsewhere— were not only great artists but also racially and sexually transgressive figures in American society. That’s why Prince’s music works with Nicholson’s Joker — the centuries old association of black music with id, impulsivity and moral degradation. The racial subtext of Prince’s half Joker, half black man face was also a powerful undercurrent, even though on the surface it merely seemed like a way to combine the Batman brand with the Prince persona. I’m still intrigued by the possibility of the Joker played by a black actor.Just as importantly, Prince made the Joker sexy, or at the very least introduced the idea that the character could be sexualized. Before that, Joker was essentially asexual. And although Nicholson’s Joker was a predatory sexual being, he was definitely not sexy. Prince’s Joker, however, was both alluring and chaotic.
1994’s The Shadow seemed to basically be the result of a lot of people saying “why didn’t we cast Adam Baldwin as Bruce Wayne” and while I like Baldwin a lot as an actor it was really not very good.
Alec — Adam was in My Bodyguard and Independance Day, among other movies. And Alec Baldwin wasn’t the problem with The Shadow, in fact by and large the whole cast was pretty good. Same is true for The Phantom, the leads were note perfect. Good performances can’t overcome weak scripts or direction, especially in period pieces that have that additional challenge to make it relevant to modern audiences. I’d argue that The Shadow was larded up with Mongol warriors, telekinesis and talking knives — stuff that missed the essence of the character and went for baroque, colorful style. (Phantom actually had a solid plot, but lackluster direction. Still Catherine Zeta Jones and James Remar stand out in it.)
ETOOMANYBALDWINS
Tim Burton’s Batman is still the best Batman movieJust dark enough without getting portentous, Keaton was the best Batman, and I prefer Nicholson’s Joker to any of the other movie JokersI didn’t watch the Batman Animated Series, so I don’t know what his backstory was there, but the various backgrounds of the Joker as a failed comic are pathetic more than interesting. I much prefer the Nicholson backstory that he was crook that went nuts instead of a nut that became a crook. And while Ledger’s Joker was an intriguing in a nihilist fashion, he wasn’t any fun
Decided to watch Batman again. Still great, and the out-of-time aesthetic makes it timeless in a way I don’t think Nolan’s Batman will beBut watching it again reminds me how much this is emphatically not a Batman origin story. It is a Joker origin story, but Batman is already fully formed and out and about. We get the requisite flashback to the alley, but it is very different from most superhero movies in that it assumes that most of the audience already knows who Batman is and just dives right in
I also always liked how the fact the Batsuit was so constraining changed how Batman moved and fought. He had to move his whole body to look at something, he was very still and upright when fighting, letting the bad guys come to him. It made him very weird, alien, and stoic. As with some other great movies like Jaws, the constraints help make the movie better.
You know, I want to get sentimental about this one. I do. I really do. For a Gen-Xer who was a teenager at the time, ‘89 was a genuinely awe-some year, and Tim Burton’s blockbuster visual grab bag was the first film I ever saw— in the multiplex, no less— in the company of Mary Jane.🌿On the other hand, looking back with 21st-century hindsight, the fact that Batman could be seen anywhere and everywhere that summer and Do the Right Thing couldn’t— maybe isn’t really something to celebrate.
I go into homes for a living.EVERY boomer has the Batman VHS somewhere in the house. Somewhere.
I recall seeing ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ in the theater and thinking it was an annoying bore. A genuine disappointment. That was when I first recognized Spielberg’s unfortunate habit of learning all the wrong lessons from his previous ‘blockbusters’ and doubling-down on precisely the bits he shouldn’t have doubled down on.
Yeah, everybody else’s opinion and the objective numbers show that you are in the minority here bud.
I remember the flap over the casting. The one sentence I really remember making the rounds from one of the protesting letters was “by casting a clown, DC and Warner Bothers have defecated on the histoy of Batman.” Which, well, ok then.
“Cuz I bought it in Japan.”
I recall the summer of ‘89 as the age of the “collateral hit” – Batman was so huge that all the showings were sold out, and other films apparently did unexpectedly good business on the overflow. I remember Weekend at Bernie’s as the most notable beneficiary.
“Virtually every kid I knew owned at least one Batman T-shirt”These shirts were everywhere and there was nowhere a kid couldn’t wear one. They were like jeans. Wearing a Batman logo shirt didn’t even mean you liked Batman. They were kind of like those old Mickey Mouse logo shirts.
I think Batman ‘89 is actually the best Batman movie of all time. It is the most influential: Batman ‘89 is how we got Batman Returns, the best Batman sequel ever made. It also influenced Batman’s portrayal in the comics. While in the 80s DC had shifted to grim n’ gritty Batman, what with the Death in the Family story, post-Batman ‘89 DC starts exploring Batman’s broken psyche more and more. In the 1990s they finally “break” Batman completely, introducing Bane in the process. By the Black Glove stories in the 2010’s, it’s established that everyone in the DC comics universe is aware of Batman’s superpower: his insanity.Then there’s probably the greatest run of Batman actors anywhere: Kevin Conroy, voice of Batman for over 20 years in several TV shows, movies, and video games. Batman: the Animated Series owes Batman ‘89 a huge debt for its style and presentation. It does what Burton couldn’t do, and cast a hulking, imposing Batman. It fleshes out the art deco Gotham. It introduced Harley Quinn. Without Batman ‘89 turning a popular comic book character into an icon, the wheels don’t turn for everything which followed.
Batman is one of my all-time favorite style-over-substance films ever made. Narratively, it’s a mess; Bruce Wayne/Batman is a complete non-entity (Keaton does so much with so little, but he’s given so goddamn little), the film’s momentum DIES when Vicki and Knox are around, the action scenes are poorly shot and claustrophobic and pale in comparison to contemporaries like Last Crusade, and the film is lacking in staying true to the tenets of the source.BUT…..Jack Nicholson puts in an energetic performance for the ages. Anton Furst’s Gotham City is one of the most visually stunning places a movie has ever created. Danny Elfman’s “Batman” score and theme has only been topped by John Williams’s “Superman”. The anachronistic noir trappings — the shadows, the smoke, the trenchcoats, the tommy guns, the deco architecture seemingly stretching upward and forever — makes the film an utter delight even if you muted the film. And the movie is quotable as all hell. It’s messy, unfocused, with a hero who might as well not exist, and not just in the mythical way the film presents. And yet, it’s a blast, with an audiovisual experience so sensational, I’ve seen it four times in the theater in this millennium, just because it’s still a truly special way to experience it.
“Danny Elfman’s “Batman” score and theme has only been topped by John Williams’s “Superman”.”If I were doing a top 5 superhero score list, I’d probably have it 3 or 4. Alan Silvestri’s Avengers theme is pretty boss, and Michael Giacchino’s score for The Incredibles is up there. I’ll allow that recency bias may be coloring my opinion William’s Superman, naturally, is the undisputed best. On a tangent, Elfman’s Batman theme is responsible for the deplorable condition of the TV networks’ themes for their NFL programs. When Fox scooped the rights to NFC games out from under CBS, they needed theme music for their fledgling NFL broadcast. A Fox exec was on vacation at one of the theme parks with a Batman ride, and while waiting in line, listening to Elfman’s Batman theme, it hit him that Fox’s NFL theme should be something like that: sufficiently bombastic, a lot of minor notes, “brooding,” etc. I think what Fox ended up with is fine — for them. But when CBS got back into NFL telecasts, instead of their damn fine NFL Today theme of yesteryear, they went with some horrible copycat job. And NBC did the same goddamn thing when they got the rights to Sunday night games (not the Joan Jett-inspired song, but the music they play in and out of breaks). It’s all just awful. I don’t hold that against Batman or Danny Elfman. But whoever signed off on that music at CBS and NBC should be fired.
I think it proves two axioms: don’t overthink it (your enjoyment that is) and sometimes the sum is greater than the parts.
Ah, the short-lived Gemini phase of Prince’s career. If only the original plan (according to The Purple One himself) for the album/soundtrack came to fruition: a mega-LP of dueling personas, with both funk songs (performed by Prince playing the Joker persona) and ballads (performed by Michael Jackson playing the Batman persona) inspired by the film.
“The Joker is a known murderer who killed a mob boss in broad daylight in
front of cameras, and he’s also a suspected terrorist in possession of
chemical weapons. But throngs of Gotham citizens still clog the streets
when the Joker shows up to throw money from a parade float. Nicholson
makes this seem vaguely plausible, at least within the movie’s skewed
reality.”
Given current events, the only thing I find implausible about this that the Joker wasn’t running for President.
I was only 6 years old in 1989 and my only exposure to Batman was the campy Adam West show. I remember being upset for how different the movie was. I kept thinking “Where’s Robin? Why is it so dark? Where are all the other bad guys? What happened to Batman’s eyebrows?”
And for the record, Keaton IS the best Batman!
I agree, the others can’t quite play Bruce Wayne as someone who can pretend to be normal. Bale/Affleck come off as messed up even in their normal persona, while Keaton can quietly mourn his parents while still acting like someone you wouldn’t expect to be Batman, he’s just some normal businessman/philanthropist.
To this day Batman still ranks as one of the biggest cinematic disappointments of all time for me. There was so much hype and publicity for it and 8 year old me could not wait to see it. I didn’t get to see it at the cinema despite really wanting to but when I finally saw it on video I just didn’t like it all that much. I wanted a fun action movie with cool set pieces, something the same years’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade delivered in spades but Batman was a clunky, fake looking bore with crappy action sequences and none of the kind of spectacle I wanted to see. My feelings toward have mellowed a bit with age but I still wouldn’t rate it very highly – strangely enough my favourite parts of the movie are the earlier parts of the movie with the Robert Wuhl character investigating Bruce Wayne.I did see Batman Returns at the cinema and I disliked it even more.
Was that the one with Michael Keaton?
That preview, though. This was one of the films that started the whole “let’s put out a preview in November for a summer movie” phenomena. It had no music. And it popped to life with the flame jet at the back of the batmobile. You’d go to the theater and hope—pray that the Batman preview would play. “Who are you (gerk)?!” … “I’m Batman.” … “Alfred, let’s go shopping” … “I’m Vicki Vale, and you are?” … “Wait til they get a load of me.” … “Where does he get those wonderful toys?” You knew those lines and were ready for them when the movie came out. The trailer was so successful, WB never cut a new one. Maybe a new one came out on TV the week it opened. Part of the great thing was you didn’t know what the movie’s soundtrack theme and cues were going to be. The Prince thing was fine – in the arc of Prince’s great albums, let’s be honest, Prince’s Batman soundtrack was only O-K. It was an experimental EP, really. But Danny Elfman’s score – holy shit Batman. He knocked it out of the park. Elfman was on an upward career arc that peaked with this soundtrack and kept cresting through Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands. Can you today hum the Batman Theme from Burton’s movies? Imagine hearing it for the first time. It was Elfman’s “Jaws Theme.”But that preview, though. Whoever cut that preview together deserves to be running a studio now.
I wish they had pushed Connery for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Last Crusade.
1989 felt like a summer of nothing but sequels (Batman one of the few exceptions), including disappointing James Bond(!) and Star Trek(!) entries. (These two movies have their charms, but not necessarily for general audiences).
It may have its many flaws as a movie, but for me 1989’s ‘Batman’ defined so much of the character and the world for me. I’ve never really been a fan of Robin or any of the other Bat Family, because this Batman worked alone. Joker as “the world’s first fully functional homicidal artist” has always stuck with me as a concept. And Gotham as a city that’s almost psychotic in itself definitely feels true to me. As much as I love Nolan’s Batman films (and particularly Heath Ledger’s Joker), none has been as definitive for me as this.
I think the best part of the Tim Burton Batman movies is that they realize that Batman isn’t the most interesting part of these stories: it’s the villains. Keaton is pretty forgettable as the Batman, but Joker, Penguin and Catwoman are all endlessly more compelling.
I remember 3 very specific things about the Nicholson/Keaton Batman:1. Robert Wuhl’s “King of the Wicker People” line (who knows why? Wuhl is awful…);2. “Never rub another man’s rhubarb” – a line I still quote to this day, complete with impish laugh; and 3. The horrendous sound editing on the crappiest line in a movie full of crappy dialogue: “Where does he get those wonderful toys?” It feels like it was recorded on-set but had to be chopped mid-word due to some production noise or other. Every time I watch it, I literally can’t look at the screen for that moment, and uncomfortably cover the line with a throat-clear or talking, just to avoid how embarrassing it is.
Tim Curry was never signed to do Batman 1989. He was however originally cast as the Joker in Batman: TAS before he was replaced with Mark Hamill.
I know I’m super late, but has anyone found any info on how they did the Joker makeup? At the time, all the articles concentrated on it being a “closely guarded secret” and I never saw it broken. I still can’t quite tell if it’s prosthetics, or just thread work, or what.Malls at this time were crazy, every Spencers/Gadzooks/Hot Topic had the same bin of 8 or so posters, Most of the t-shirts were actually more comic-book art than anything to do with the movie, and I would’ve killed for the Joker earrings that were the Joker on one ear, and HAHAHAHAHAH on the other
I got excited to see a new Breihan article in my feed, but of course what we actually have here is the perfect encapsulation of the new zombified AV club: reposting the content of actual professionals that they no longer care to pay for, in hopes of a quick cash-in harvesting clicks from the unwary.A fitting farewell from a company that no longer deserves anyone’s attention.
I was wondering how an article posted 9 minutes ago had 400 comments already.
I reread the entire article before noticing it had 380+ comments and realizing it was a repost from two years ago! And I read it then, too, and didn’t remember I’d read it. Because I’m getting old and senile.
AVC has republished old articles for years in various series. This isn’t something from the Herb era.
Great piece, I just think this part might be overblown:The Oscars that year virtually ignored all the big box-office successes, instead rewarding middlebrow prestige fare like Driving Miss Daisy and Born On The Fourth Of July—both successes, but not exactly blockbusters—which helped codify the divide between Oscar movies and popcorn movies.It’s a nice thought, but looking at the Oscars in the 90s I think ‘89 was more of an outlier than predictor. Silence of the Lambs, Forrest Gump, Titanic, Braveheart, etc. were all massive hits/cultural phenomena and acclaimed films. I mean hell, Beauty and the Beast was nominated for Best Picture, at a time when there were only 5 nominees! The modern divide really didn’t happen until much more recently.
Driving Miss Daisy’s domestic box office was $106,593,296. I’d say any movie that grossed over $100M in the ‘80s can be considered a blockbuster.But I’m in the permagrays so what do I know.
Also, was it too hard two years ago to do a little research? Back to the Future Part II was not a summer blockbuster. It was the big Thanksgiving release in 1989. I know because I was there.
Although Braveheart wasn’t quite as big as we remember it being; #18 for the year in the US, below Waterworld, Mr Holland’s Opus, Congo and Father of the Bride II! Internationally, it was a little better, #13 for the year; but still below the “disastrous” Waterworld!
Fair! It was going against Apollo 13 which was the #2 movie of the year. But you’re right my memory was Braveheart being much bigger than that, that’s very interesting. I think we also remember Waterworld as being more of a failure than it was because of its massive budget and the fact that it’s just a bad movie – had it had a normal blockbuster budget for the time its gross would’ve been fine.
I think it was more or less written off as a flop before it came out because of the budget and the negative publicity, it would have had to have been a Jurassic Park-level hit to rewrtite the ending.
So, slideshows, gossipy newswires and reposts of years-old essays is the business model going forward, then?
We didn’t even get a write-up of 2021’s highest grossing movie.
Best movie of 1989 was UHF. But Batman was pretty damn amazing at the time.
I’m surprised that there has never been an extended cut, with scenes added back in. Oh well.