A Belated Apology to Joel Schumacher (Signed, The Internet)
It’s been established to the point of being comic book canon by now that Joel Schumacher single-handedly destroyed the Batman franchise. The bastard!
But is it the truth? Certainly Batman & Robin was, well, awful — it’d be impossible to argue otherwise. But was it actually, as internet fans like to imagine, Schumacher singlehandedly driving the Bat-franchise off of a cliff? Or is he the latest scapegoat for the greed and miscalculations of faceless executives behind the scenes?
Below, culled from various interviews, the people behind the Bat-franchise and Joel Schumacher himself discuss several of the myths behind Batman’s cinematic undoing. (Sources provided at articles’ end.)
The Franchise in Crisis
While Batman Returns might be perceived as a success in the eyes of contemporary Batman fans, it was by no means heralded as such at the time, by either Warner Bros or the film industry. According to Joel Schumacher, the perception at Warner Bros “was that Batman Returns had ended the franchise, and none of the theaters wanted it. We would have meetings with theater distributors who didn’t want another Batman movie, because they had gotten burned on Batman Returns.”
Returns had cost roughly $80M to produce, double that of the original Batman — and while it wasn’t a box office failure, neither was it able to match the original’s gross. As well, many castigated the film for its intensely dark, even cruel tone as the reason for the slump. “Fans complained [Returns] was ‘too weird’,” writes internet encyclopedia Wikipedia. Film critic Leonard Maltin accused Returns of being a “nasty, nihilistic, nightmare movie” with a dark, mean-spirited, and often incoherent screenplay. Mark S. Reinhart, author of ‘The Batman Filmography’, labels the Batman of Returns “a remorseless killer, pure and simple.”
This new, unwelcome dark tone had parent groups complaining that kids were being forced to stay away from a film that was supposed to have been made for them. Far from today’s current internet philosophy that comic book movies should be made for internet fans, during the height of the Batman franchise, most insiders were of the mind that it would be nice if the films made a shitload of money instead — a feat that fan-focused “niche” films were incapable of, but one that kid-friendly pictures could, and can, accomplish easily. (Witness the disparity in grosses, for instance, between last years’ PG-rated superhero movie The Incredibles, versus last years’ fanboi-focused R-rated The Punisher.)
Batman Gets Returned
Returns is now lauded by fans of the franchise for the same darkness and fetishism that originally inspired a backlash. But whatever its perception today, the message was clear to Warner Bros: Burton had made a Batman movie that decidedly wasn’t for kids. ‘Films in Review’’s Ken Hanke noted at the time that Burton was doomed to become WB’s new whipping boy, “thanks not just to the relative box-office failure of Batman Returns, but also because of the extremely vocal parental outrage leveled against the film.” Explaining the difficulties he had in selling tie-in endorsements for a third Batman movie, Schumacher explains, “None of the merchandising people wanted the merchandise, because they had had it all sent back” on Returns.
Though Schumacher is usually singled out for the new, lighter direction of the franchise, it isn’t often noted that he had specific (and fanboi-displeasing) marching orders from WB: make the franchise a kid-friendly cash cow again. “Darren Aronofsky, a wonderful director, called me about a year or so ago,” said Schumacher in a recent interview. “He said he’d like to make a Batman movie and asked me what I thought about it. I said, ‘Darren, I’d love to see your take on that but let me tell you something: if you think they’re going to let you make Darren Aronofsky’s small, dark, personal Batman movie, forget it.’ Because the movies may make hundreds of millions of dollars but the merchandise makes billions. That’s where the money is.”
Batman Forever All Over Again
Schumacher was brought onto the project with Tim Burton’s blessing. “I would not do Batman Forever if Tim [Burton] didn’t agree on me for the job,” says Schumacher. “Tim’s a friend, and he told me that he was anxious to go off and do something else other than another Batman movie. He said, ‘Please, please, I had a nervous breakdown during Batman Returns.’ He was going through a lot. It’s very difficult when you make a huge movie and it’s very successful. The pressure on doing the sequel is a whole different story. I know what Tim went through now, and I know why he said to me, ‘Please, please, I don’t want to do another one.’” Schumacher, who had “collected and read Batman comics as a kid,” took the project on.
Batman star Michael Keaton’s side of his dismissal as the caped crusader is that he “decided not to be involved” on a third Batman project, having read the script. Schumacher tells a different story: “We were actually making it with Michael Keaton, but his demands were so ridiculous that Warner had to fire him.”
“Batman Forever had a very modest budget, considering the phenomenal profits it made, and how little we all made,” Schumacher admits. “We had very modest salaries. Val and Nicole and Chris O’Donnell… the salaries we all got for Batman Forever were so small.”
Historical revisionists eager to drag Schumacher’s name through the mud seem to forget that Batman Forever, unlike the castigated and under-performing Returns, was both a critical and financial smash, returning the franchise to the heights it had enjoyed in its first outing. “With Forever, the hardest part was the pressure of not knowing if the audience was going to accept our version of Batman,” says Schumacher. “But they accepted it just fine. It was sexy and fun, and it was the most profitable movie of the year.”
Lighter in tone, more action-oriented and kid-friendly, Forever remade the superhero into the merchandizing cash cow Warner Bros had been looking for all along. “Nobody paid much attention to us,” says Schumacher, “and then the movie kicked ass, and anybody who had been stupid enough to come onboard with their merchandise made a fortune.”
Batman and Robbin’
The decision to make still more money from the again-profitable franchise seemed inevitable. In its efforts to be as kid-friendly as possible, the fourth installment in the franchise, Batman & Robin, was tasked to be a more decisive return to the kid-friendly camp that Burton had hoped to dispel with his first two installments. This time around, banking on the success of Forever, money was no object. The only mandate: get kids in the theater, and make something that would sell a shitload of toys. “On Batman & Robin, they threw money at us — as one of my best friends says, ‘The devil always comes with the biggest cheque.’”
“With Batman & Robin, everybody got really greedy,” explains Schumacher. “They wanted more toys, more machines in the movie, to make it more for kids. Adults think kids are too scared of Batman, so we had to make it more kid-friendly, make it funnier, make it lighter.” It was. Batman & Robin was a disaster. “I take full responsibility,” says Schumacher.
‘The Batman Filmography’s Mark S. Reinhart argues that “Batman & Robin looked like it should have been a hit. You had huge actors like Clooney and Schwarzenegger signed on, you had most of the same creative team that put together Batman Forever (in my opinion a far better Batman movie than Returns was), and you had decent characters such as Freeze, Ivy, Bane and Batgirl that had never appeared on the big screen before. . .All of the film’s problems probably kind of snuck up on Warner Brothers much like all of Batman Returns’ problems did.”
Post-B&R, most involved in the film were eager to separate themselves from it; the franchise was put on hiatus for retooling. In interviews, star George Clooney would later jokingly take full responsibility for the death of Batman — though on the internet, fans had a different target: Joel Schumacher.
On the critical pummeling of B&R, Schumacher freely admits: “We deserved it. I mean, if you get a pummeling, you deserved it.” Certainly as director of B&R, Schumacher is accountable for many of the film’s poor choices. However, given the mandate he received from WB, one would be hard-pressed to blame him for poor decisions that were thrust upon him. In this respect, Schumacher did precisely what he had been asked to do. “With Batman & Robin, I was opening toy stores in Sydney, Australia,” he jokes. “I had awards for selling more Batman merchandise than any human being in the world.”
“I notice that a lot of people are being very unkind about The Matrix [sequels],” adds Schumacher, drawing a parallel. “You don’t realise the pressure you’re under because now you’re expected to be a hit. The first Matrix, we all discovered it. And you get points for getting discovered. But the minute you’re a hit and you’re rich and famous, you’re looked at differently.”
“That’s the difference with a big budget: you’re expected to get a lot of asses in a lot of seats. And if you think differently, you’re out of your mind.”
Thoughts? Disagreements? Discuss this article in the forums here. (Membership not necessary.)
Sources
http://www.theonionavclub.com/feature/index.php?issue=3912&f=1
http://industrycentral.net/director_interviews/JOESCH01.HTM
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Batman-Returns
http://www.batman-on-film.com/mreinhartinterview.html
http://www.moviehole.net/news/1667.html
http://www.timburtoncollective.com/articles/misc18.html
http://filmforce.ign.com/batman/articles/624/624398p1.html
http://www.splicedonline.com/03features/jschumacher.html