Michael Keaton says Batman is the only comic book movie he’s ever seen
He didn't even watch Batman Returns all the way through
Film News Michael Keaton
Michael Keaton famously starred as Bruce Wayne/Batman in Tim Burton’s 1989 film, Batman, which changed the trajectory of the superhero genre. As it turns out, Keaton watched Batman in its entirety then never saw a single comic book-based film ever again.
“After the first Batman, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an entire [comic book] movie,” Keaton said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
The actor doesn’t have a particular reason, other than simply being too busy to sit down and watch the mountain of superhero films made since 1989. “I just never got around to it. So you’re talking to a guy who wasn’t in the zeitgeist of that whole world,” the Birdman actor said. “When I went down to do the Marvel things in Atlanta … It’s an entire city dedicated to Marvel … They’ll be doing Marvel movies forever. I’ll be dead, and they’ll still be doing Marvel movies.”
Keaton recently reprised his role as Vulture for Marvel’s 2022 feature Morbius, where his lack of background on the MCU caught up with him. “I’m nodding like I know what the fuck they’re talking about. I go, ‘Uh-huh.’ And I’m thinking, ‘You may as well be explaining quantum physics right now to me. All I know is I just know my guy. And I know the basics,’” Keaton said. “So finally, they were looking at me, and they just started laughing. They said, ‘You don’t know what we’re talking about, do you?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t, no idea what you’re talking about.’”
In addition to playing Vulture, Keaton recently suited up as Batman once again for Andy Muschietti’s The Flash starring Ezra Miller, which allowed him to see if he still had the chops needed to ace the character over 30 years later. “Frankly, in the back of my head, I always thought, ‘I bet I could go back and nail that motherfucker,’” Keaton explained. He walked away from the superhero franchise when he disliked the script for the 1995 Joel Schumacher movie Batman Forever. “And so I thought, ‘Well, now that they’re asking me, let me see if I can pull that off.’”
The Flash will not only bring back Keaton’s version of Batman, but also Ben Affleck’s, in the time-bending film based on the Flashpoint comics. However, it took more than a couple of reads for Keaton to fully understand the multiverse aspect of the film. “I had to read it more than three times to go, ‘Wait, how does this work?’” Keaton recalled.
“They had to explain that to me several times. By the way, I’m not being arrogant, I hope, about this. I don’t say it like, ‘I’m too groovy.’ I’m stupid. There’s a lot of things I don’t know about. And so, I don’t know, I just kind of figured it out, but this was different,” Keaton added. “What’s really interesting is how much more I got [Batman] when I went back and did him. I get this on a whole other level now. I totally respect it. I respect what people are trying to make.”
The Flash is set to premiere sometime in November 2022.
78 Comments
Keaton’s lingua franca is incredibly refreshing. I also love that his understanding of the MCU/DCU is only slightly better than my dad’s.
I was going to say he sounds like he gets these films just as much as your average guy who’s pushing 70. I’m looking forward to it.
I laughed that he doesn’t understand the tie in’s in Marvel or the multiverse in DC. This couldn’t make me happier and I bet he will be awesome in Flashpoint.
You always hear that some Marvel/Star Wars actors feel constrained or weird when they only get the parts of the script they’re in. Keaton… “who gives a fuck?! Just gimme my lines!”
Here comes slideshow Mel!
hahaha! Spot on!
Theres a classic simpsons clip for just about everything.Which further proves they probably should have ended it after season 12 or so.
See I still liked the show till like 2007ish. So I can live with it going for 16 or 17 seasons even if most of 2005-2007 was silly shit.But yeah peak Simpsons can’t be touched.
Yeah I fucking loved this so much!
DC, just give him his own damn Batman movie! “Batman Returns…Again!”
Fuck it why not! At worst it can be on HBO Max but more likely it would do better than most of their movies and be better than most of them.
At least give us some animated movies!
It’s always nice when an actor just wants to act and doesn’t care about the comic book bullshit.
He’s the one reason I’m looking forward to the movie.
Fascinating. For my money, though, there aren’t a lot of MCU villains more threatening than Adrian Toomes (Kilgrave, Thanos and Killmonger, maybe), and a lot of that is because of his performance.
Thanos seems like he’d be a pretty chill Prom Date’s Dad.
“Have Gamora back by 11, or I’ll replace another one of Nebula’s body parts with cybernetics.”
And given what Keaton says here, that “don’t give a fuck” attitude serves his character well. He knows who Spiderman is and doesn’t give a shit. You mention anything involving Thanos or Kang and he’s like “The fuck? Hey, I’m just here to get paid. All that crap? Not my problem.”
Yeah, just as a guy in a car with a gun, he’s more menacing than most supervillains have been on the big screen. And the moment where he opens the front door for Peter is one of my favorite “record scratch” moments of all time (and one I completely did not see coming).
Totally read that in Keaton’s voice
The only unthreatening thing about him is that he’s not bright enough to think of hiring a lawyer to resolve his origin story contract dispute instead of becoming a supervillain, which in another light is the most threatening thing about him. Maybe ScarJo should take a page from his book and start suiting up to steal and auction off Marvel memorabilia instead of taking Disney to court.
Honest Trailers nailed it, he’s just another MCU CGI villain in the Vulture suit, but he’s scary as hell when he’s Michael Keaton.
I mean, he was pretty freaking terrifying as no fucks given Beetlejuice, and he channeled some of that for Toomes. Like, Beetlejuice on 6.
Yep, he’s so good in that scene in the car. Pete had the ability to give him a super, severe beat down but he was scared shitless.
Y’know what I love so much about the Vulture reveal in the movie? It feels like a twist that would’ve happened in the original Spiderman comics (think Romita Sr. era). You have a couple issues of Peter fighting the bad guy dujour, and then he finds out that villain is his GF’s dad.
And yeah, Peter could easily knock his ass out, but that’s not the conflict. It’s how he navigates all of these factors while still saving the day.
Also, I can’t stress this enough: he knows who Spiderman is, and doesn’t give a shit. From the minute he figures it out, he knows it’s more trouble than its worth and just tries to work around it. Even when he goes to jail, he doesn’t rat Peter out. Why would he? Peter saved his daughter, and spreading the word around would make things more complicated for everybody. Hard pass. I found that so incredibly refreshing.
Toomes, Kilgrave, and Killmonger are essentially human. Yes they have super powers and/or access to super-power tech. But their motivations, while monstrous in execution, are motivated by human impulse. And the characters themselves are played by actors with little-to-no makeup or special effects. Thanos is a cartoon. The Chitauri are cartoons. Hela, Redskull, Ego, Ultron — these are basically cartoons. It’s fun to watch them but they’re not scary because I have no real life equivalent to equate them to. I’m excited to see Eternals but after watching the latest trailer I was a little let down to see it looks like a lot of the conflict will be between the heroes and CGI monsters.
Damn but he sounds like Michael Keaton. Also, while there are many paths to defending Batman Returns, not watching it would allow him to avoid hearing himself deliver lines like “Eat floor.” Jury’s still out on whether “I was their number one son… but they treated me like number two” is the best or worst line in the movie.
“Jury’s still out on whether “I was their number one son… but they treated me like number two” is the best or worst line in the movie.”It’s a terrible line saved by a fantastic delivery.
This is the correct take.
that movie is full of terrible lines saved by fantastic delivery.
I love that Keaton frames his disclaimer about not wanting to be seen as being “too cool” for superhero movies in the least cool way possible. “I don’t say it like, I’m too groovy.’” TOO GROOVY. Awesome. I love Michael Keaton.
He’s one hep cat, you dig?
He ain’t no L7 lame-o, daddy-o!
Yeah, after years of snobby hot takes that are at least as tiresome as the diehard fans, this humble grandad approach is almost charming.
And again.
He’s on the latest Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast. SOO good.
Considering Beetlejuice appeared in his namesake movie for only 17 MINUTES yet is considered his most indelible role says it all about Keaton.
He said the same thing about that Shakesbeer guy when he played Dogberry.
He said he never saw another one after Batman. That doesn’t mean it’s the only “comic book movie” he’s ever seen. I mean, it’s pretty likely Keaton saw Superman in 1979, everyone did. Or maybe watched Adam West’s Batman movie from 1966, who knows. Not even going to go down the “not every movie based on a comic book is about superheroes” rabbit hole. Does this matter? Not really, I guess, but still.
Also going by what he said, it doesn’t rule out that he’s possibly seen *parts* of superhero films since Batman in 1989. After all he says (I paraphrase) that he’s not sure since that Batman that he’s seen an *entire* comic book movie.
Probably, even, since that’s not a qualifier you generally need otherwise.
yeah Michael Keaton prolly saw Ghost World lolWhat is Thora Birch up to now anyway(nobody tell me, I know already)
Does he even know that Spider-Man is a comic book movie?
He’s Batman.
I like to think he watched ‘Batman Returns’ up until the CD scratching bit, and was like, “Ugh, I forgot I did that. Yeah, I’m out.”
Hot take: Batman Returns is a masterpiece.
I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I do like it a lot. I enjoy Michelle Pfeiffer’s near-feral take on Catwoman.
It’s good, but it’s a bit too… Burton for my tastes. Like, ‘89 was also pretty Burton, but it had enough of a foot in the real world to provide a counterbalance, whereas Batman Returns goes full Burton to the extent where it seems to take place in a city where the only three inhabitants are members of the same goth anti-social weirdo support group that Burton founded. Which is totally fine if you’re into that sort of thing, but if you’re not it can get kind of annoying. For me it’s kind of the diametric opposite problem to the Nolan movies; the Nolan movies are so focussed on bringing Batman down to earth that they kind of forget to have fun with the weirdness of it, whereas Burton gets so entangled in the weirdness of it that he drifts entirely away from reality in a cloud of mopey goth Expressionism.
I don’t think that Batman has to be too grounded in reality. Especially not with his rogues gallery. The problem with Burton’s Batman films is that Burton has no familiarity with the characters. He just did what he wanted to do. After the success of the first, he was able to exert more control which is why the Penguin had a circus gang because WB wouldn’t let him use it for the Joker in the first film. At least Nolan gave his Batman the moral decency to not kill.
Oh sure, I quite agree about the lack of familiarity with the characters, and normally I’m the first on the “Batman shouldn’t be taken too seriously or too grounded” train. But just like I think the Nolan films maybe teeter a bit too close to the “take it so seriously it becomes ridiculous again” line, Returns just goes a bit too far the other way. I just can’t really get into Burton’s full goth-meets-German Expression-meets-a kind of Brechtian thing going on take.Like, ‘89 also has that wonderful Burton-meets-Furst aesthetic, but there’s also people milling around the streets day or night, there’s scenes where we just see ordinary Gothamites doing their thing, there’s scenes where Knox shoots the shit with other reporters, that kind of thing. It’s hardly grounded in actual reality, but there’s still world-building, a sense that people actually live in this version of Gotham. Conversely, I can only think of, like, three scenes in the whole of Returns where we see any extras at all. It doesn’t feel like I’m watching a world that people live in, it feels like I’m just watching people run around a set. Which isn’t bad, but it’s just kind of a turn-off for me. Of the films, I think ‘89 kind of hits the sweet spot in that sense. (Of course, it’s all academic, since B:TAS is pretty much the definitive perfect version of Batman anyway, but nevertheless.)
So what you saying is Batman Returns needed more Billy Dee Williams?It’s possible I have completely misunderstood what you were saying though.
FINALLY — SOMEONE GETS IT
I don’t much care for the navel-gazing of the Nolan films. Batman Begins makes a bunch of really strong arguments for why Bruce shouldn’t become Batman, and then he does it anyway. Just not a concept that stands up to logical scrutiny. It’s a bit of a square peg in a round hole. I see what Nolan was trying to do, but it’s just too stilted and wooden to work. Love the go-for-broke performances of Ledger and Hardy, of course.
Yeah, gotta agree there. Those films are loaded with all those nitpicky “here’s why Batman doesn’t work in the real world!” arguments that fans love but which kind of miss the point that Batman’s ultimately as much a fantasy character as Gandalf, and if you’re going to do Batman you’ve really got to lean into the fantasy to some degree.Like, thanks for explaining that Batman bulk-orders his masks through a dummy corporation to prevent anyone from cottoning on to his secret identity I guess, Nolan, but I’m already buying that he’s in a world where the best way to solve Gotham’s social problems actually is to dress up as a bat, I’m happy to take some of the little things on credit and suspend my disbelief there to be honest.
I like the fact that it goes full Burton. It distinguishes it from other films.
Fair ‘nough! To each their own.
Not sure that qualifies as a hot take, it’s an increasingly common view these days. In the 90s it was a bit of a hot take, these days it’s more of a cooling on the windowsill take.
Hotter take: Batman Returns is the best live action Batman film.
I’ll give ground to Mask of the Phantasm possibly being the best full stop.
Pretty sure that’s just you describing reality there.
1. The Lego Batman Movie2. Mask of the Phantasm3. Batman Returns
I completely blanked Lego Batman, which technically is set in all universes of Batman films (thanks to that brilliant recap by Alfred).
I don’t like the Nolan films much at all. Easy for me. Mask of the Phantasm is very good, so that is a much trickier choice.
It’s definitely a lot of fun, but it does include the precise moment the Batman franchise went off the rails: “Get in the duck”
It’s not perfect, some of the third act is a bit messy, but I love how it’s just this weird psychosexual drama that happens to star Batman. So much more interesting than most superhero media.
I’m pretty sure that was a double’s hand. (I don’t know, but that’s my head cannon.)
He’s never seen Men in Black? Oldboy? Blue is the Warmest Color? Road to Perdition? The Fountain? A History of Violence? Persepolis? Snowpiercer? Ghost World? Barbarella? 30 Days of Night? The Mask? The Rocketeer? Sin City? Scott Pilgrim? The Death of Stalin? American Splendor? 300? Edge of Tomorrow? Or does he maybe just have a blinkered view of what a “comic book movie” is?
Whatever it takes.
There’s another line in this scene I absolutely love:
Want a beer?
It’s a 7 o’clock in the morning.
Scotch?
I disagree. Keaton is absolutely too groovy to know about that kind of stuff.
Yeah Steve, I like pizza.
However, he has seen The Exorcist about 167 times.
“too busy” is almost always a fabrication. If there is something that takes two minutes or two hours then over a period of one day or one week it is impossible that that amount of free time does not exist.
Take that, Road to Perdition!
I’m glad that Keaton has returned to action in Hollywood. The guy is just great. If you haven’t seen his episode of Norm MacDonald Has a Show on Netflix, you should. It’s fantastic and reminded me of the fact that Keaton started out as a stand-up before his film career took off.
I thought I read an interview recently where he was praising “The Dark Knight”….while also admitting he only saw parts of it.
Damn that car scene on the way to the dance was so great. the tension during the ride capped off with the malice at the drop off was so well acted. just perfect.