For years, Warner Bros. has tried—and mostly failed—to use its DC superhero movies to imitate what Disney has been doing with Marvel, introducing characters in their own solo movies and then putting them together for a big team-up movie (though only Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman really got introductions like that before Justice League came along). Now, though, the studio has landed on a brilliant idea that plays to its own strengths rather than mimicking Marvel’s, and it might give DC just the push it needs to get its superhero movies back on track—and by “its own strengths” we’re specifically referring to one of the best damn things to come out of a DC superhero movie: Michael Keaton’s Batman.
According to Deadline, Keaton is currently “in early talks” to reprise his role as Batman (as seen in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman and its 1992 sequel), but rather than being the focus of his own adventure, he’d be taking on a more advisory role to a new generation of heroes. Deadline refers to it as a “Nick Fury-like” gig, and while that does mean this is once again explicitly imitating Marvel (referring to Samuel L. Jackson’s role as the guy who ties together all of the Marvel movies, one way or another), it’s hard to object to that when we’re talking about the freakin’ Michael Keaton Batman.
The specific details of how this would work are even more exciting, and not just because it would apparently mean excising Justice League and Ben Affleck’s Batman from the canon of DC’s movie universe. Deadline says this would specifically pick up Keaton-Batman’s story after Batman Returns, meaning he would be playing the same Batman who broke up Joker’s museum date and fought off murder penguins at the abandoned Gotham zoo, and he would be serving as a mentor in the upcoming Flash and Batgirl movies. (This would also give them a chance to recast the Flash, if they were maybe looking for an excuse to do that, since keeping Ezra Miller would be a meaningless connection to a series of now-unrelated movies.)
Deadline cautions that a deal between Keaton and Warner Bros. “may not happen,” but c’mon, this is has to happen. We know budgets might be a little tighter with Zack Snyder shoveling barrels of cash into his new version of Justice League, but this is the Michael Keaton Batman we’re talking about. Pay him whatever he wants.
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So basically Batman Incorporated?
Batcow BETTER be in this movie.
What’s batcow’s backstory?
Damian Wayne saved him from being slaughtered and then he’s just kinda hanging around in the Batcave for moral support. He’s basically an emotional support cow for Bat-people!
Here’s his backstory…
Grant Morrison has much to answer for.
That Bold Bovine has nothing to answer to except JUSTICE!!
What, like when we all thank him?
So, I see Cobra Commander, Snake Eyes, Freddy Mercury, Nite-Owl, Bruce Wayne’s racist Halloween costume from his boarding school days that he’ll eventually issue a fuaxpology for once the internet finds it…and a cow. I’ve no idea what this comic is but I may have to find it now.
You forgot Boba Fett.
I think your Fett is my Cobra Commander. I can see your point though, and it does away with a surplus Joe character. Fett wins out!
Cobra Fett? Win-win!
It’s from Grant Morrison’s run on Batman From 10ish years ago. They are the Batmen of all nations and it is super awesome. Handily DC have been collecting the whole crazy story he wrote in giant volumes. If I’m recalling correctly (I last read through it 8ish years ago) they should show up near the beginning. Bit of a warning however Grant Morrison goes heavy into Batman’s past adventures and it gets a bit crazy at times. You will want to keep something to access Wikipedia on for some parts.
Grant Morrison’s run was a lot of fun. His basic premise was everything that happened in a Batman comic was canon, including all the loopy versions and spin offs of Batman that appeared in the Silver Age.
Or Batman Beyond meets Batman and the Outsiders meets Kingdom Come. I give up: just put it all in a Bat-Blender.
The Batmen.
It’s the Village Bat-People!
It’s the Quiet Bat-People! (Everyday superheros! Honest Wombles! Human Inter-Railers!)
“All British Supremes.”“That sounds like a racist tribute band.”
“Normality as a kind of superpower”
BATMAN BEYOND PLX
It’d be a handy way to distance this from all the other DCEU stuff without necessarily having to disown it entirely.
Crossing my fingers hard for this. I haven’t watched any DCU movies except Wonder Woman in the past ~20 years, but I loved Keaton’s Batman back in the day and would pony up to see him again.
Wait, you haven’t seen any of the Nolan Batmans?
I have fallen asleep while my husband watched a few of them but I don’t count that because nothing I saw as my eyelids grew heavy made me want to wake up. (I like Bale, but I don’t like ultra-dark superhero movies. Keaton had a sardonic thing going on.)
This is about right. After the original largely drunk cinema visit I could barely remember, I tried to get through Dark Knight Rises three times, and either sleep or extreme-boredom-off-button got in the way. When I finally managed it on the fourth attempt, I was left wondering why. It’s utter bobbins
Ugh. Just give it up, DC movies.
Does that mean they’re keeping Man of Steel or not? I like Cavil, but if you’re going to jettison everything other than Wonder Woman anyway, why not clear the table of that piece of detris too?
I kind of figured they’d use the CW Arrowverse’s Crisis on Infinite Earths to do a soft reboot. Probably the best explanation as to why MoS, BvS, Justice League, and Suicide Squad aren’t in continuity anymore.But with the Snyder Cut being a thing WB is making it kind of up in the air at this point. I’m hoping that this is just a one-time thing and we’re not seeing a Snyder-helmed DCEU again.
Suicide Squad is still in continuity, since James Gunn’s sequel has multiple characters coming back playing the same characters they did in the first one (including Jai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang, the only thing I liked in the first movie!). They even said they were thinking about re-casting Deadshot with Idris Elba, but decided to make him a different character so that Will Smith could potentially come back as Deadshot in a future movie.I think they are just going to keep making standalone movies AND movies tied to the old continuity without making a big thing of it, and this is Keaton thing is the start of ANOTHER separate continuity that might be more tightly controlled. After all, they are talking about Keaton as old Batman at the same time they are actually shooting Robert Pattinson as young Batman, and I don’t think we know yet whether that is the young version of Affleck’s Batman or if it will just be yet another Batman continuity on its own.
They should just take a page from the ridiculous X-Men franchise. It’s kind of all one continuity until it isn’t and we reserve the right to recast, change parts of it, ignore other parts or just straight up rewrite the entire timeline at a moment’s notice.Also, 80% of it will suck.
And that’s just the X-Men in comics, never mind the films.
Are the TV shows supposed to be in the same multiverse as the movies? I know they’ve done some cameos of actors from other movies, but I wasn’t aware that they were connected explicitly.
They were explicitly separate universes, until the recent Crisis. Even though it was just the one cameo, it basically incorporates the movie universe(s) into the new multiverse that the TV shows reside in. Not in any way that would pay off in the future, I don’t think, but it’s basically canon now.
Interesting. Which DCEU actor did the cameo? I don’t think I heard about that one.
Ezra Miller showed up as Flash.
Gotcha. I figured it was probably him.
Did you mean “detritus”?
I did. Thanks, Clippy.
NP – next time just avoid the big words!
I’ll stick to sin gull sill uh bulls.
And this fits with the other Batman film how…
It probably doesn’t? The DC movieverse has like 3-4 different continuities right now anyway. I think the plan over there right now is just to throw a bunch of shit at the wall and whoever sticks gets to be canon going forward.
So they are basically playing the Hunger Games with their IPs
same way it fits with the other joker movie. it doesn’t.
They could just embrace the way their TV incarnation has made DC the “multiverse-centric” media continuity, and just offer some clips for the CW shows to flash past in the next crossover.
This seems ill-conceived. The best DC movies so far—Wonder Woman, Shazam, arguably Joker—are the ones that don’t even try to fit into some larger DCEU continuity. Why can’t Warner Bros just keep doing that? Marvel already roundly defeated them at the whole “shared universe” thing.
As is the case with most overpaid, perk-based and nepotism heavy professions, a great many movie execs are very, very, very bad at their jobs.
The only business model in Hollywood is to imitate the latest thing that did good box office. So, as long as the MCU keeps minting cash, Warner Bros will keep trying to copy it.Of course, they’re NOT really copying it – where Marvel took their time with single-hero movies to establish core characters and then brought in the Avengers crossover, Warner Bros keeps trying to jump straight to the team-up. I don’t blame them so much for getting distracted by Marvel/Disney’s success – who wouldn’t be? The flaw is in attempting to copy that model in an impatient, cart-before-the-horse way.
The thing that’s most stupid about Warners apparent strategy of copying MCU is that they could have done this themselves from 1989.
Apart from Supergirl, which is tied to Donner’s Superman and a throw away reference to Metropolis in Batman Forever, they couldn’t be bothered to explore the DC Universe.
Then after Marvel struck gold, Warners thought that cheat coding their way to a share universe (via Diana’s laptop browsing) was the best way to do this.
Would Justice League really have been that much better if we’d gotten standalone Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg movies beforehand? While Warner Bros. is guilty of rushing to the team-up (that email browsing session in Batman v. Superman is just embarrassing), the real problem is that they didn’t nail the casting, and the assembled team has no chemistry together. Aside from maybe Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, there’s no actor that makes the role their own the way RDJ or Chris Evans did. It’s impossible to imagine that version of the Justice League hanging out in their spare time, the way the Avengers all have a party in Age of Ultron. I didn’t necessarily need to watch a two hour movie about the Flash to know that Ezra Miller’s take on the character is all wrong.
Other than the fact that I’m a big fan of Jason Momoa’s Aquaman, I can’t really disagree with anything you’ve said here.
I agree that the casting was suspect, but I think there was another problem there – a problem that’s shared by the X-Men movies, by the way. Namely: in a movie of reasonable length, it’s very hard to tell an effective story about a cast of many characters. There’s just not enough minutes and dialogue to give you reason to care about all of them. The advantage that “The Avengers” had was the audience already had time to get familiar with and invested in Iron Man, Black Widow, Captain America, and to a lesser extent Thor, Hawkeye, and the Hulk. The studio had already ironed out some of the kinks in the movie versions of their characters and people were feeling pretty good about them. Joss Whedon then had the luxury of assuming we already knew what the deal was with these characters, and he could jump right into the story of these solo figures coming together.There are probably a few people for whom “The Avengers” was their first MCU movie. I imagine they thought it was pretty good, but kind of meh – similar to the way I felt after watching Bryan Singer’s X-Men movies. If, however, you’d already seen RDJ as Iron Man and you’d been pleasantly surprised by “Captain America: The First Avenger,” your memories of these movies were part of the way you experienced “The Avengers.” So to answer your question: yes. Give me a reason to care about Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg before you put then in a team-up. And if you can’t think of a way to do that, then you should dig deeper into the DCU to find a cast of characters who are a better match for your project.
I think solo movies could’ve given the writers/directors/cast more time to settle into the characters, which in turn could better inform the ensemble. Just look at Defenders, and how that improved on Iron Fist and Luke Cage.
I think it’s a really good idea honestly.
Executives, the so-called “adults in the room” of these heathen mediums, only will do something if it has been previously proven to work, even if the proof was lightning-in-a-bottle and they personally haven’t been able to recreate it on the big screen (the small screen is another matter, however). In other words, they believe that it wasn’t a matter of copying the success of their competitors; it was that they didn’t copy them *hard* enough.Still, there are possibilities in this approach. It might just allow them to quickly explain away any discontinuities and just move on to the next thing.
Barsanti feigning interest and enthusiasm towards something is probably the most interesting part of this story. I can hear him Googling ‘positively intentioned adjectives’ from here.
Just redo Batman v Superman with Keaton and Cage!
Yes! Bring back Tim Burton and let it be the final part of an insane trilogy.
am i the only one who is picturing this as a bad/good riff on face/off
“Now, though, the studio has landed on a brilliant idea that plays to its own strengths”“a “Nick Fury-like” gig”Oh well.The sad thing is, I know next to nothing about DC lore, and even I could find a better spine for their superhero franchise dreams than copying Marvel again.
“(This would also give them a chance to recast the Flash, if they were maybe looking for an excuse to do that, since keeping Ezra Miller would be a meaningless connection to a series of now-unrelated movies.)“According to the Deadline story linked here, Ezra Miller’s Flash movie is the first movie Keaton would be making an appearance. It sounds like you guys are imagining Keaton’s Batman would be the start of a whole new DC-movieverse. What is more likely happening is Ezra’s Flash will get up to some multi-verse shenanigans that bring Keaton in from a different “universe,” rather than shrugging off what DC/WB have already done casting Keaton is likely (another) attempt at trying to figure out a way to bring what they’ve already done all together.
DC nailed the one universe they’ve tried so far, so it’s only right that they create a few more as a victory lap.
To be fair, DC needing a Crisis to clear up their multiverses is possibly more true to the comics than anything else they’ve done so far. LOL
he’s gonna make 1.5 of these and then wb will hastily pivot again.
I kind of love how excited this article is about removing Batfleck version of the character because he killed and replacing him with another version of Batman who also killed.
Maybe it’s because Batfleck’s movies were really bad. Though Keaton’s Batman movies were pretty bad too, a lot of people love them.
I don’t think killing is mentioned. It’s just the general excitement of having the better Batman back.
I love Michael Keaton. But having just recently rewatched Burton’s Batman films, I have to say, I don’t get the excitement over this. Keaton was given almost nothing to do in those movies. Burton was clearly far more interested in the villains in both films, so much so that Batman feels almost like an afterthought in his own movies. Keaton is fine in the role, but I think this is a case of rose colored glasses. His Bruce Wayne had some nice moments, but his Batman was pretty forgettable, through no fault of his own. I would be excited to see him return to the role under the vision of a director that’s actually interested in characterization and not just art direction and bravura villain performances though.
Well, his Bruce Wayne WAS his Batman, but wearing a (metaphorical) mask…
I haven’t rewatched them in over a decade, and can’t remember very much about his Batman at all, but I don’t think the excitement is owed entirely to his performance 30 years ago. I think it’s more that a modern day Michael Keaton would deliver a much better performance based on some of his recent work(In particular, I think Birdman and Spiderman Homecoming). That plus the fact that the most recent iterations of live action Batman have been excessively dark and brooding, so if this new/old Batman can be rooted in something at least marginally lighter, it’ll very much be a change for the better.
That’s why I’m excited for this anyway.
Schumacher dies and Michael Keaton is Batman again. Coincidence…or conspiracy?
He could be the Bruce Wayne after the event of The Dark Knight Returns. I always thought that would have been a GREAT movie to bring Keaton back for. Too bad Zach took bits and pieces of it for BvS. Imagine a world where Keaton and Christopher Reeve were the leads!
Batman Beyond is right there. It’s just sitting there. PICK IT UP.
Keaton as old Bruce and Pattinson as older than high school Terry would be just fine with me.
I came here to say this but you said it for me. This is only worth doing for Beyond. I know DC wants that bat-money but if they can do Joker and an R rated Battinson, then they can have their cake and eat it too, by continuing interesting Batman stuff on the side. Batman Beyond would be a better fit for a DCU Justice League anyway.
Sounds like Batman Beyond to this relative novice when it comes to all things Batman.
Meh. Call me when they re-hire Burt Ward.
He was just in the Arroverse Crisis on Infinite Earths
Great! More incentive to watch that.
The Dark Knight Returns, with Keaton as Batman, or GTFO.
So who’re they casting as Terry?
Terry Crews.“Future Batman loves Future Yoghurt!”
That’s a bold choice and I am for it.
I really couldn’t care less about comic book movies but is going back to Tim Burton anyone’s idea of a good reset?
Not unless they hire Burton to direct!
*mentally compares Burton and Snyder films*Yup, that seems like it would be a step in the right direction.
Dude wears a bat costume on the regular, has several boys around the house in bird costumes, and married a woman who wears a cat costume.Maybe Nick Furry would be more appropriate?
Batman faces his most challenging villain yet: the Kink-Shamer!
Great. Another Gotham City psychiatrist gone bad. At least the Kink-Shamer would have plenty to do!
For Keaton’s Batman? Yeah, he’d probably be OK with that.
At this point in the DC mess, it’s probably not a terrible idea to throw in the towel and go with an “it’s all true” approach to film and TV canon. Something something multiverse is as good an explanation as any.
“…to imitate what Disney has been doing with Marvel”If you want to be correct, it’s what *Marvel* had been doing with Marvel – according to open, quite-public plans – long before Disney ever got involved.Marvel’s success at it was what made them lucrative and got them purchased by Disney. In fact, *since* Disney, they’ve done the opposite just as much: they’ve introduced new characters in the ensemble films *before* making their solo adventures.
I think the big examples of that would be Black Panther and Spiderman, both introduced in Civil War. While T’Challa is pretty seamlessly introduced through the plot, I remember it being something of a big deal that Spiderman was just sort of tacked on just to put him in. I’d never really thought of how similar that scene is to Bruce going to collect Barry Allen. They’re both characters we’re just supposed to believe that the rich tech dude knows about, and that he can just walk up and recruit them in a few minutes with no problem. So I don’t know why Tony and Peter’s scene just seems to work so much better than Bruce and Barry (or even worse, Bruce and Arthur). Maybe it’s actor chemistry, or maybe it’s just RDJ having the force of some five movies behind him to sell the character.
In any case, even though I think it’s a fair point to say that Marvel was behind the initial decision to build up to The Avengers, I don’t think Disney was necessarily mucking up the formula later on. Especially with the success of GotG, I think they recognized that they had enough momentum within the whole process to start deviating from that initial plan here and there. We’ll probably see the fruits of this with Phase 4 (or won’t, I guess, if blockbuster movies go the way of Blockbuster Video) where a bunch of unrelated things have to succeed on their own merits again, without even the name recognition of something like Iron Man.
“I don’t think Disney was necessarily mucking up the formula later on.”I didn’t say they ‘mucked’ it up – particularly because Marvel is still doing the strategizing, not Disney, which has rubber-stamped Marvel’s plans because of its ongoing huge success. It was Marvel’s own wildly successful *establishment* of itself as a *film* brand that led to the “surprise” success of GOTG (again, w/o Disney’s involvement in production.)Nonetheless, while *under* Disney, Marvel has reversed their approach – as you back me up. They now use the ‘established’ brands to introduce the lesser-known ones (Cap. Marvel, too), as we’ll see continue in Phase 4, where the subjects are even less-known.
Sorry, I wasn’t being adversarial there, just sort of commenting alongside you. I did get the impression you thought Disney was putting its fingers in Marvel’s success plan, which might be why I chose the word ‘mucking’, but I understand what you meant now. I thought it was an interesting point, since I tend to credit Disney and Marvel in equal measure just because I don’t view them as truly separate entities.
I think Tony’s recruitment of Peter works a lot better because it is simply better written, better acted, and a more fleshed out scene than Bruce and Barry’s. (Peter, in fact, gets an entire introduction all his own, before Stark comes knocking.) Naturally, the big deal was Spidey coming back home to Marvel; Our outside knowledge of the situation having so many layers to it, what with his sale being the reason Marvel didn’t go out of business in the 90s, while also being the reason they had to use their 2nd string heroes to start their movies in the first place. The emotional baggage of it, along with such a lovingly perfect rendition of the character, made it a pretty emotional experience for me, at least.
Why not just do Batman Beyond. It it the obvious move.
The real flex would be to bring back Clooney, but I guess I’ll take Keats.
I don’t see how this makes sense. The world in those two movies or other older Batman movies was nothing like the fantastical stuff in any of the new DC movies. So how would that Batman impart anything useful to anyone?
I can see Keaton doing a good job with a Frank Miller style ‘Dark Knight Returns’ Batman (before Miller lost his mind with ‘The Dark Knight Strikes Again’ and made Bruce a giggling fascist murderer). He could get across those feelings of regret and pain that underlie a still-unstoppable quest for justice.
The ONLY way I could see this as being an good development, was if Keaton was going to play Old Bruce Wayne to a Batman Beyond series. Otherwise, it’s just choosing to make another confusing Batman reboot while already in the midst of shooting a Batman reboot.
If Warner Bros. want to emulate Marvel’s success, they need to just make
a plan and stick with it. A plan that honors the DC universe and
characters the fans already love, stop making directors (who want to
recreate those characters according to their whims) the stars of the
show each time a new one is taking over. The vision for getting the DC
non-comic book universe in order should be about bringing the DC comics
to life, not grim dark, “realistic”, nihilistic versions or silly,
poorly written versions. Currently with DC movies and TV shows it’s
either way too dark and “adult” (Justice League, Man of Steel, The
Emancipation of Harley Quinn, Harley Quinn and any number of DC animated
movies) or goofy and nonsensical (most DC CW shows). Kids should not
watch most of the adult stuff (as an adult, I sick of the constant swearing in DCAMU and all the live action too),
and some adults can’t get engaged with the CW. So it’s murder and adult
language on one end and constant repetitive stupidity on the other.
Marvel
isn’t perfect, nothing is, but kids can watch much of all Marvel
productions, and they don’t insult adults’ intelligence. Maybe with the
end of the DCAMU, we can make things more family friendly. I don’t have
kids, I just don’t enjoy the adult-ness.
The best WB/DC currently offers is Young Justice, Doom Patrol, Star Girl (seems promising). I am worried that Wonder Woman 1984 (having read the spoilers) is gonna be a huge blunder, after such a huge success with a character. What else is there to look forward to? Suicide Squad 2, Aquaman 2, Shazam! 2, another version of Batman, another version of the Joker (please god no), then still up in the air, Black Adam & The Flash, but honestly none of if has me excited. They are more consistent with delays and postponements than actual movies. DC just wears me out. Maybe it would help if Warner Bros. got rid if the Bros!
I actually quite like this idea. Keaton seems better suited now he’s a craggy veteran to when he was meant to be a millionaire playboy.I also like that they’re prepared to do something completely different with Batman. I still wish they had made The Dark Knight Returns with Clint Eastwood in the 90s however.Edit: Also, in the Amalgam comics, Bruce Wayne and Nick Fury were combined as Bruce Wayne: Agent of SHIELD. So there’s some precedent.
OH MY GOD, JUST MAKE BATMAN BEYOND ALREADY.Michael Keaton would be PERFECT for that version of Bruce Wayne. Give Terry McGinnis Batman the whole “iron man interior helmet view” thing, don’t try to shoehorn an entire franchise worth of exposition into a single movie, make sure to grab some people who worked on Blade Runner, and make sure Ace stays in the movie and everything will be schway.
MORE blackface? C’mon, DC…
“Great. What did they used to call it? Stereo?”
Holy shit a good idea from DC for once!
Give me Batman Beyond please. Then transition it into the Future Justice League.
I maintain that Michael Keaton is the finest of the Batmen.
Interesting. My main interest would be seeing Batman Beyond, with a college-aged Terry McGinnis, though it’s tough to imagine that Keaton’s world led the way to super-technology that becomes semi-Jetsons like in the near future. And if Jack Nicholson wants to come back I guess they can include a throwaway line about one of Ra’s Al Ghul’s Lazarus Pits. Why not?