Kevin Smith says Batman Forever ‘Schumacher Cut’ is not a myth—he has a copy
The longer cut of Batman Forever is rumored to run [gulp] 170 minutes
Aux News Kevin Smith
Kevin Smith has, once again, found himself in the middle of a DC movie lore. Following the time he nearly made a Superman movie in which Nicolas Cage fought a giant spider, Smith revealed on his podcast, Fatman Beyond, that not only has he seen the rumored extended cut of Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever, he has a copy.
“You know what I got a copy of?” Smith told Fatman Beyond co-host Marc Bernardin. “Batman Forever, the ‘Schumacher Cut.’”
Batman Forever’s near-three-hour version is the stuff of legend. With images of Val Kilmer’s Bruce Wayne staring face-to-face with a giant bat seared into the memories of millennials who first saw the picture on trading cards and promo materials, the “Schumacher Cut” is said to be a darker, more serious version of the director’s first Batman movie. Of course, who knows what that actually means, considering the film still features a scene where Robin shows off his karate skills while doing the laundry—much to Alfred’s delight.
Rumors of a “Schumacher Cut” have floated around the internet for some time. Deleted scenes have appeared on YouTube and the Batman Forever DVD, while photos showing Tommy Lee Jones’ Two-Face in Arkham surfaced online.
Interest in the restored version of Schumacher’s film grew during the “Release The Snyder Cut” fan campaign of the late 2010s. In July 2020, Bernadin brought the myth to the masses in a series of since-deleted tweets. “I have it on VERY good authority that a 170-minute cut of Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever exists,” he wrote. “Warner Bros. is unsure if there’s any hunger for what was described to me as a ‘much darker, more serious’ version.”
Smith believes he “probably shouldn’t be talking about this” but promises to get a copy to Bernardin, so the two can discuss the cut on their podcast. For now, we’ll have to go by Smith’s five-word review: “I’ve watched it. It’s longer.”
[via The L.A. Times]
118 Comments
Nobody ever brags about having seen a shorter cut.
Look, Rabbi Weisenberg may have depth perception problems but he’s still a good man and a pillar of his community.
Well, maybe more of a still fairly sizeable pole of his community, these days.
Fortunately, there’s sartorial solutions that compensate for rabbinical misjudgment that may plague some unfortunate Hebrew gentleman:
It’s like putting Darth Maul back together…
It wasn’t the nipples. It was the damn codpiece!-Chris O’Donnell, on the costuming choices for Batman Forever.
Just don’t let him perform any circumcisions.
I had a shorter cut of The Matrix 2. It was better.
Except for those who talk about the director’s cut of Blood Simple.
What? Do tell. I just rewatched it and can’t imagine anything leaner.
Yeah but “I bought a DVD” isn’t much of a brag.
I have. Turned it off after 30 minutes.
There’s a cut of The Phantom Menace that removes Jar-Jar and some other stuff and makes it a better movie.
Donnie Darko is the one that comes to mind where the directors cut does nothing for the movie and is worse.
This isn’t exactly a shorter cut, but the theatrical version of JFK is FAR FAR superior to the director’s cut, and for a long time you could only get the director’s cut on video. (Since then, the theatrical version has been made available for purchase on streaming.)
Not brags about having seen it, but the shorter cut of “Darling Lili” is pretty much universally agreed to be better than the studio-mandated longer road-show version.
I cannot sanction this tomfoolery.
Wasn’t it buffoonery?
*buffoonery. (RIP Cormac)
*buffoonery
Thats not a movie that editing can fix.
Following the time he nearly made a Superman movie in which Nicolas Cage fought a giant spider A little pedantic but I believe it was Tim Burton that was trying to get that movie made. Smith was recounting being in the writer’s room at some early part of the process in a standup segment
Kevin Smith was brought in before Tim Burton. He completed a script, was doing rewrites and then Burton was hired and decided to do a completely different script with Nicolas Cage wearing the cape.(The giant spider comes from a producer.)
Good thing they both failed
You can find Smith’s script online and it’s pretty solid. It has its flaws and I don’t see how it would have been made for less than $100 million, but it certainly would have been better than the last few Superman movies.
That’s not where my mom said I come from…
Ah i see. But then it wasn’t Smith that was trying to get that movie made then, right? Is there a script out there for it?
“A little pedantic but I believe it was Tim Burton that was trying to get that movie made.”
He’s referring to the Superman Lives script that Smith wrote which the producer tried to get him to force a giant spider into the script. The Superman movie never got made and the producer managed to get the giant spider shoe-horned into Wild Wild West.
I’d pay good money not to see that.
And I assume sir will be paying with…
Tellya what – today and only today I’ll let you not see it for the lowlow price of only $100. Whaddya say?
Underrated Batman film.
The whole “Snyder Cut” thing started this weird trend in (usually DC Comics) fandom where people wanna give bad movies a second chance. Seriously – is there any way the “Schumacher Cut” of Batman Forever could be good? Almost every decision in the making of that movie was bad. Same goes for Suicide Squad. Some fans are clamoring for the “Ayer Cut” – nearly everything he revealed that was cut from the movie was of Jared Leto’s overacted Joker. Who the hell wants to see more of that?
What can we say? It’s fun to see directors release the version of the film they had always intended. Studios get in the way and ruin things often.
Jared Leto?And literally nobody else.
To be fair, the Snyder cut actually is significantly better than the studio cut.
Never understood the canonical north american hate to Joel Schumacher, will never do. Personally I cannot wait to see what this is about.
Homophobia, lol. No, I do think Schumacher makes some bad movies, but certainly the camp and flamboyance, let’s say, of the Schumacher Batmans inspired a lot of hate that was quite strongly ‘course corrected’ with the Nolan flicks where he played the myth of Batman quite, ahem, ‘straight’ – much to the rejoice of ‘true’ comic book fans.
Hate everything Nolan did to Batman: functionally cementing Frank Miller’s shitty take for the better part of two decades. Miserable, joyless dreck.
Lmao wtf, Nolan’s Batman is nothing like Miller’s edgelord Batman
This reaction always puzzles me because those movies are far from joyless. Having rewatched them recently, there’s plenty of humour in there.They’re far less dark and grim that the internet seems to remember them being.Particularly Batman Begins.
lolwhat
We don’t hate Schumacher, we hate Batman and Robin, and are annoyed by Batman Forever. But it wasn’t really his fault, the studio wanted it to be more lighthearted and family friendly. Hate Schumacher? On the contrary, how could we ever hate the man who gave us Lost Boys?
WB has always been a mess of a studio and seem exceptionally prone to indifference to the films they release as long as they make a lot of money. I think there are parts of Batman Forever that work and overall it’s nowhere near the abomination that is B&R. How anyone at the studio watched B&R and agreed it was ready to release is beyond me.
this
Lost Boys, Falling Down, Flatliners, the INXS videos are all awesome but holy crap his idea to make Batman campy again was just not a good one.
I was so excited when I heard the director of those titles was doing Batman. Step aside, Burton, things are going to get *really* dark now! Yeah!And then…
At least he got Alicia Silverstone for one of them…
I think she is the worst part of both movies haha
I was a teenager at the time, I wasn’t watching the film for her acting ability…
Uh don’t forget DC Cab and St. Elmo’s Fire…Seriously, I like Schumacher as a director. 8MM and Tigerland were pretty durn good. Just his Batman movies weren’t good.
I’ve never seen DC Cab and I like the theme song for St. Elmo’s Fire better than the movie, though I can see why people like it 🙂
I kid, but DC Cab wasn’t actually bad. Nick Nolte and Mr T must have been a trip to watch, off-camera. Pretty sure Nolte did his own stunts saying racist shit to Eddie Murphy in 48 Hrs lol
St Elmo’s Fire should never have been made. It had like negative point to it. It stole having a point from other movies. Rich gorgeous idiots can’t decide what bright future they’ll get to choose, how engaging…
Nick Nolte must have been a trip for everyone to work with during the ‘80s woof…I’ll have to give it a shot.Exactly, the movie never really makes me care about the characters because, yeah, rich beautiful idiots. The song, however, is damn fine…I mean come on:I can see a new horizon underneath the blazin’ sky
I’ll be where the eagle’s flying higher and higher
Gonna be your man in motion, all I need’s this pair of wheels
Take me where my future’s lyin’, St. Elmo’s fireThose are some fuckin lyrics right there!
Dnt forget Phantom of the Opera and The Number 23.Schumacher made great films and he made bad films. He was very hit and miss but when he was good, he could be great.
Or is it a great one?Due to it being on Amazon Luna, I got to play Arkham Knight for the first time recently. I really enjoyed Arkham Asylum and skipped Arkham City. And what a conceptually alarming trainwreck. And it feels like the nadir of playing Batman straight. And its is a grim as grim can be and as dark as dark can be and its just toxicly awful. The Riddler making me do car races in the sewer is where I just quit in exasperation.The fans loved this game. I’m really worried about people like that. More thought went in to Poison Ivys breasts than in making any of the sewer racing make a lick of sense.
I never really got into those games, seeing crap like those car races really turned me off.Honestly I kind of liked the portrayal of Batman/Bruce Wayne in Titans: A messed up, obsessed guy who proceeded to screw up a procession of young adults to the point where they were as broken as them. Beating the Joker to death and then running away seemed like a pretty natural conclusion, nobody can go on like that forever.
THANK YOU. Iain Glen’s damaged Bruce, who fucked up Dick (and then Jason) because he had no template for parenting any other way, was seriously interesting.
Ok cool I’m glad I’m not the only person who thought that. One of the only bright spots in the whole series was his portrayal of a dude who has been Batmanning for decades and is seriously fucked up.
Oddly enough, Glen is playing a pretty crappy father on Silo too.
The Riddler car races in that game could fuck right off. All the car shit could. God that always took me right out of the game.
Tigerland is really good too. As is Phone Booth, and Veronica Guerin. I haven’t seen all of Schumacher’s stuff but I’m tempted to say that the only bad movies he made were the Batman ones.
Oh yeah Phone Booth is real good, haven’t seen those others.
Because the vast majority do not understand that he was forced to make heavily-marketable extremely shallow Batman flicks by the studio. Now, you could say “well he could’ve just turned down the job”, but who among us would really turn down the piles of money for “artistic integrity”?That being said, I’ve always found BF to be enjoyable. B&R, however, is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen of any genre. Not helping the terrible writing is the casting of Clooney. He’s just too affable to be Batman/Bruce.
I try to watch B&R occasionally but I get as far as the museum scene when the hockey thugs skate in down the stairs as our heroes watch, whipping back and forth like they’re doing the twist. It’s just a bit too extra for me.
“Because the vast majority do not understand that he was forced to make heavily-marketable extremely shallow Batman flicks by the studio.
*cough*HORSESHIT*cough*
I’d love an explanation of how he was “forced” to come back and make an even worse Batman & Robin after he was “forced” to do the first one.
Having read the original screenplay, which is available online, I assume the extended cut is mostly about restoring the film’s original and very dumb pop-psychology arc for Bruce, which involves him struggling with repressed memories about his parents’ death.
(SPOILERS) The flashbacks of young Bruce running into the night with his father’s diary and ending up with the Batcave were meant to set up the revelation that he read in his father’s diary that the Waynes went to the movies at his insistence, which makes him feel responsible for his parents’ death. In the scene where the Riddler and Two-Face invade Wayne Manor, he was supposed to get amnesia and forget he was Batman, but ultimately come back to himself when he finds his father’s diary at the bottom of the Batcave and reads the rest of the last entry, which reveals that he actually wanted to see a different movie that night, so he isn’t responsible for his parents’ deaths after all! (END SPOILERS)
“Never understood the canonical north american hate to Joel Schumacher, will never do.”
Randomly select a movie from about 90% of his filmography.
I sat at a bar with my bandmate recently and watched Batman Forever. Our collective reaction the entire time was “fuck this movie” and I remember loving it when it came out. No specific blame to Schumacher, but this shit was off the rails.
the “Schumacher Cut” […] still features a scene where Robin shows off his karate skills while doing the laundry—much to Alfred’s delight.That wouldn’t necessarily be out of place in a darker, more serious Batfilm, though it would definitely work better if Robin were actually a teenager rather than in his mid-20s.Smith’s five-word review: “I’ve watched it. It’s longer.”…Still better than Harry Knowles’s reviews.
Ryan Schreiber of Pitchfork needs to thank his lucky stars that Knowles’ Blade II review exists, because it means his weird blackface review of Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard: The Master Takes isn’t the most awful, embarrassing, and offensive review ever released on the internet.In case you’re unfamiliar with the latter: http://web.archive.org/web/20040810064854/www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/c/coltrane_john/live-at-the-village-vanguard.shtml
Oh no! Why didn’t Schreiber have anyone else read that review before it was published?
Kevin Spacey would like to read for Alfred.
You could vomit on a paper plate, then post a pic, and it would be better than a Harry Knowles review.
I’d give it a shot, but for the moment I’m filing this under “Sure, why not?”
He also has a super hot girlfriend. You just don’t know her because she goes to a different school.
I thought she lived in Canada?
Look, if you’re just going to start making places up, I’m not going to respond to you.
nope, Niagra Falls
Niagra Falls!? Slowly I turned . . .
Were you at the Niagara Falls Laundromat? Was there a guy doing karate?
She goes to Degrassi.
She does. She is also a model
In the sense that she’s an anime figurine you bought at the comics shop. So a model so to speak.
I would never have a relationship with a anime statue! That’s what waifu pillows are for!
I wonder how his wife would feel about that.
“I’ve watched it. It’s longer.”This is exactly what I expected. I’m sure it’s a darker, more serious version of the lighter, less serious version they were shooting for.
I still stand for the version we got. It was fun. Kilmer has the look. Kidman never hotter. Carrey firing fastballs. Recast Jones (or tell him not to do bad Joker karaoke)
Michael, Mick or Ralf?
“Now with more batnipples!”
“And batcodpieces!”
Ahem…”utility codpiece” they got secret gadgets secreted in there!
Betcha bite a nip!
I’d bite Batgirl’s nip.Oh, wait. She wasn’t in BF.Don’t care. Still would.
Naughty!
.
Okay Kevin.
To each their own but I’ve never been able to take comic books/super heroes seriously so my favorite will always be the Adam West Batman movie that was written by Lorenzo Semple Jr. (who would later pen the the eighties Flash Gordon movie). Such beautiful crazy nonsense (the Penguin submarine with giant flippers, the “Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb” bit and still the coolest Batmobile, Batcopter and Batboat to date).The problem with Schumacher is his lack of narrative sense and inability to get a firm conceptual grip on the material coupled with a slop on top of slop visual sense. It’s also a little ironic that the movie was hamstrung with the same idiotic Akiva Goldsman plotting amd dialogue that people for some reason don’t have a problem with in “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.”I honestly think that if Burton had just transferred the style, wit and overall vibe of “Beetlejuice” into his Batman movies we could have had the perfect flick. As for the Schumacher cut, I wouldn’t Battouch that with a ten foot Batpole.
BATMAN: “My sidekick sucked 37 dicks!”
COMISSIONER GORDON: “In a row?”
That’s a lot of dicks
Bruce Wayne : …It’s not who I am underneath… but what I *do*… that defines me.Rachel Dawes : …and that is?Bruce Wayne : [singing] Noinch, Noinch, Noinch, Schmokin Weed, Schmokin’ Weed, Doin’ Coke, Drinkin’ Beers, Rollin’ fattys, smokin’ blunts, Who smokes the blunts? We smoke the blunts.
“Alfred?”
“Yes Master Bruce?”
“What the FUCK is the ‘internet’!?”
Bruce Wayne : You’re vigilantes.Henri Ducard : No, no, no. A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed, or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can’t stop you, then you become something else entirely.Bruce Wayne : Which is?Henri Ducard : A BERZERKER!, Mr. Wayne.
ooh, what a lovely tea party!
Alfred Pennyworth: Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to making fuck, BERZERKER!
Did that elderly butler just say “making fuck”?
Alfred: “C’mon Bruce, sing Berzerker, Robin think sexy!”
I’ll just say thank you for linking this to the 2018 Tom Breihan article that was written much more poetically and hilariously than anything this nauseating corpse of a site has produced in a long time. Favorite excerpts: “Watching Batman Forever today, it’s a fucking nightmare, a jarringly irritating pileup of blockbuster tropes and frantic mugging that doesn’t succeed on any level whatsoever”“Kilmer’s studious blankness almost works as an artistic choice unto itself. There’s a funny moment where Kidman tells Kilmer that he looks sad, and he turns to her, looking exactly the same as he’s looked for the entire rest of the movie.”“And when Carrey asked why Jones hated him, Jones simply answered, “I cannot sanction your buffoonery”—a line better crafted than anything in the Batman Forever script.”
Make Batman gay again.
*My* cut of the film would be about 4 seconds. I’d shut it off right after the Warner Bros. logo.
Kevin Smith is a joke. He calls Batman Forever dark. That’s the most ridiculous Batman movie except for the last Batman. Which i don’t even remember the name of it because of how big of a joke it was. Snyder’s version was way better, but just completely misunderstood by WB and their fans. We needed a darker version, not one that is said to be so called dark, but in reality worthless. I’m surprised he even owns the extended edition at all. Just goes to prove how big of a joke he really is. The only one of the old era that i liked was the original Batman with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson in their prime.
I’d rather watch Batman and Robin over any Nolan Batman flick—at least if i watch B&R there’s a non-zero chance I might actually have a moment of enjoyment.
Whether or not you can stand Nolan, B&R made me want to stab my eardrums and gouge my eyes out.Might be the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and not the enjoyable bad.Like Battlefield Earth, which was so bad it was hilarious.
You really want people to see this piping-hot shit take, huh?
Christian Bale Big Serious Batman Coice is that exact same voice he uses for the ridiculous Bird Howl in Howl’s Moving Castle. It’s a silly performance in a silly movie that think Batman is interesting because he growls.
The Batman I’ve loved for decades comes from a sprawling oft-dysfuctional family of adopted kids: he’s a dad, he’s a superhero, he’s a complicated guy, and what he’s not is a big growler loner what needs to be alone.
It’s so tired. It’s so rote. It’s so lazy. It’s so hollow. Nolan’s Batman flicks are all style, no substance, and the style is boring to look at.
This is the worst of all possible takes.