Batman (1989 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Batman, the 1989 film directed by Tim Burton, arrived in theaters on the 22nd of June 1989 and earned $2.2 million in late-night previews alone before most of America had even sat down for breakfast. By the end of its opening weekend, it had broken the record held by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and become the fastest film in history to reach $100 million, clearing that mark in just eleven days. The numbers were staggering, but they only tell part of the story.

  What you might not expect is that this film almost didn't exist. It spent a decade bouncing between studios that wanted nothing to do with it. When it finally got made, it starred a comedian that comic book fans despised. The director had never made anything remotely like it. And the man who would earn more from the film than almost anyone else was a movie star who negotiated his own hours around Los Angeles Lakers home games.

  How did a project that every studio in Hollywood once rejected end up becoming the highest-grossing superhero film of all time? And how did Tim Burton, a man who called the whole experience "the worst period of my life," help change the superhero genre forever?

• 2. A Decade of Rejection

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  On the 3rd of October 1979, producers Benjamin Melniker and Michael E. Uslan purchased the film rights to Batman from DC Comics. Uslan had a precise vision: to make "the definitive, dark, serious version of Batman, the way Bob Kane and Bill Finger had envisioned him in 1939. A creature of the night; stalking criminals in the shadows." Studios listened, then said no.

  Columbia Pictures turned it down. United Artists turned it down. Every rejection carried the same reasoning: the studios wanted something closer to the campy 1960s television series. The memory of Adam West in a bright costume had colonized Hollywood's imagination, and nobody could see past it.

  Uslan was frustrated enough to write his own script, titled Return of the Batman, to show the industry what a darker version could look like. The project was publicly announced at the Comic Art Convention in New York in July 1980 with a budget of $15 million, but no studio was yet involved. Warner Bros. eventually agreed to produce it, and a second script, The Batman, was completed by Tom Mankiewicz in June 1983. That draft focused on Batman and Dick Grayson's origins, with the Joker and Rupert Thorne as villains, and targeted a mid-1985 release on a $20 million budget. Mankiewicz had imagined William Holden as James Gordon and Peter O'Toole as the Penguin. But Holden died in 1981 and Niven in 1983, and those plans collapsed along with nine separate rewrites from nine different writers.

  After the financial success of Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985, Warner Bros. hired Tim Burton to direct. Burton had his then-girlfriend Julie Hickson write a new 30-page treatment, convinced Mankiewicz's version was still too campy. Sam Hamm, a comic book fan, was brought in to write a proper screenplay, which he completed in October 1986. Even so, the project stalled again. It was only after Burton's Beetlejuice succeeded in 1988 that Batman was finally given the greenlight to commence pre-production, in April 1988.

• 3. The Casting Furor

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  Fifty thousand protest letters arrived at Warner Bros. offices after Michael Keaton was cast as Batman. The backlash came not from strangers but from people who cared deeply: Batman co-creator Bob Kane, screenwriter Sam Hamm, and producer Michael Uslan all questioned the decision aloud. By 1988, Keaton was known for comedies like Mr. Mom and Night Shift, and fans assumed the film would turn out just like the television series they despised.

  The list of men considered before Keaton is a portrait of 1980s Hollywood stardom: Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, Kevin Costner, Tom Selleck, Charlie Sheen, Dennis Quaid, and Pierce Brosnan all entered the conversation at various points. Gibson turned the role down to make Lethal Weapon 2. Brosnan had no interest in playing a comic book character. Burton had originally wanted an unknown actor, Willem Dafoe, though reports that Dafoe was being considered for the Joker were false. It was producer Jon Peters who suggested Keaton, arguing he had the right "edgy, tormented quality" after seeing his dramatic work in Clean and Sober. Burton, who had directed Keaton in Beetlejuice, agreed.

  The Joker role attracted its own extraordinary competition. Tim Curry, David Bowie, John Lithgow, Brad Dourif, Ray Liotta, and James Woods were all considered. Robin Williams lobbied hard for the part. Lithgow actually tried to talk Burton out of casting him during his own audition, a decision he later publicly regretted. Jack Nicholson had been the studio's top choice since 1980, with Peters first approaching him as far back as 1986 on the set of The Witches of Eastwick.

  Nicholson's terms were unlike anything the production had seen. His contract specified the exact number of hours he was entitled to off each day between leaving the set and returning. He was guaranteed time away for Los Angeles Lakers home games. He demanded all his scenes be shot in a three-week block; in practice, his schedule stretched to 106 days. He reduced his standard $10 million fee to $6 million in exchange for a share of the film's earnings, including merchandise. Biographer Marc Eliot reports his total remuneration may have reached as high as $90 million.

• 4. Building Gotham City

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  Production designer Anton Furst described his guiding idea for Gotham City as asking what New York might have become "without a planning commission. A city run by crime, with a riot of architectural styles. An essay in ugliness. As if hell erupted through the pavement and kept on going." Furst and the art department deliberately clashed architectural styles to produce what he called "the ugliest and bleakest metropolis imaginable."

  The production moved to Pinewood Studios in England, shooting from the 10th of October 1988 to the 14th of February 1989, using 18 sound stages. Seven stages were occupied at once, including the 51-acre backlot that held one of the largest Gotham City sets ever built at that studio. Knebworth House and Hatfield House doubled for Wayne Manor. Acton Lane Power Station and Little Barford Power Station served as industrial locations, and the power plant and alien nest sets from Aliens were reused as interiors for the Axis Chemicals sequence.

  Furst's longtime draftsman Nigel Phelps created black and white charcoal drawings of key locations. Conceptual illustrator Julian Caldow designed the Batmobile, the Batwing, and assorted bat-gadgets, which were later built by prop maker John Evans. The Batmobile itself was constructed on a Chevrolet Impala chassis after attempts with a Jaguar and a Ford Mustang failed. Keith Short sculpted the final body and added two Browning machine guns. The car was later purchased by standup comedian Jeff Dunham, who had it fitted with a Corvette engine to make it street legal.

  Costume designer Bob Ringwood turned down Licence to Kill to work on the film instead. His central challenge was translating a comic book hero drawn as "this huge, big six-foot-four hunk with a dimpled chin" onto an actor with, as Ringwood put it, "average build." The Batsuit went through 28 sculpted latex designs, 25 different cape variations, and 6 different head options, at a total cost of $250,000. Prosthetic makeup designer Nick Dudman used an acrylic-based makeup paint called PAX to create Nicholson's chalk-white face, and Nicholson's contract included approval over whoever filled that role.

• 5. Music and Conflict

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  Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo, who had already collaborated with Burton on Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, was hired to compose the score. Producer Jon Peters had doubts about Elfman and was only convinced when he heard the opening number. Peters and his producing partner Peter Guber then pushed for Prince to write songs for the Joker's sequences and Michael Jackson to handle the romance material. Elfman wound up drawing on both artists' styles when composing the overall score.

  Prince's manager Albert Magnoli helped broker the arrangement, and Prince himself wrote and performed the film's songs. Burton objected, arguing that his films were not commercial in the way that Top Gun was. His objections did not prevail, and the dual soundtrack approach proceeded. Batman became one of the first films to release two separate soundtracks simultaneously: one featuring Prince's songs and one featuring Elfman's orchestral score. Both sold well.

  Elfman enlisted composer Shirley Walker and Oingo Boingo lead guitarist Steve Bartek to help arrange his compositions for the orchestra. He was later dissatisfied with the audio mixing, which had been done in England. He stated that the crew "didn't care, and the non-caring showed." Walker's contribution proved enduring: compilations of Elfman's opening credits music were used in the title sequence theme for Batman: The Animated Series, which ran from 1992 to 1995.

• 6. Batmania and the Box Office

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  In the months before the June 1989 release, a cultural moment took hold that observers named "Batmania." Over $750 million worth of merchandise was sold. Cult filmmaker Kevin Smith recalled: "That summer was huge. You couldn't turn around without seeing the Bat-Signal somewhere. People were cutting it into their fucking heads. It was just the summer of Batman."

  The marketing itself was unusual. The B.D. Fox ad agency created hundreds of logo designs and posters, many by illustrator John Alvin, but Burton and the producers chose to use only the gold and black logo that Julian Caldow had sketched in the art department. Bill Garland airbrushed the final version, with no other key art variation, deliberately preserving mystery about the film. The logo was designed to be ambiguous: it could be read as Batman's symbol or as a gaping mouth.

  When Peters read in The Wall Street Journal that fans were still unsatisfied with Keaton's casting, he responded by rushing out the first trailer during Christmas, playing it in thousands of theaters. The trailer was simply an assemblage of scenes with no music, but audiences clapped and cheered.

  The film opened to $40.49 million across 2,194 theaters over its first weekend, breaking the record set by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It also broke the record for a second-weekend gross with $30 million. It earned $100 million in eleven days. When it closed on the 14th of December 1989, its total gross stood at $251.4 million in North America and $160.2 million internationally, for a combined $411.6 million. Box Office Mojo estimates that more than 60 million tickets were sold in the United States alone. Despite those figures, Warner Bros. claimed the film had lost $35.8 million and was unlikely ever to show a profit, a conclusion widely attributed to Hollywood accounting practices.

• 7. Legacy and Aftermath

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  Anton Furst and Peter Young won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction. Jack Nicholson received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts nominated the film in six categories, and the British Board of Film Classification responded to the film's content by introducing a new "12" age rating, created specifically because Batman fell between the existing "PG" and "15" certificates.

  Bruce Timm, co-creator of Batman: The Animated Series, stated plainly that "our show would never have gotten made if it hadn't been for that first Batman movie." The animated series adopted the film's Art Deco design aesthetic and, in turn, launched the long-running DC Animated Universe. Burton himself reflected on the broader influence with characteristic wryness: "ever since I did Batman, it was like the first dark comic book movie. Now everyone wants to do a dark and serious superhero movie. I guess I'm the one responsible for that trend."

  Executive producers Melniker and Uslan, the men who purchased the film rights in 1979, filed a breach of contract lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court on the 26th of March 1992, alleging they had been cheated out of credits, involvement in sequels, and financial participation. A superior court judge rejected the lawsuit. Warner Bros. later offered an out-of-court settlement described by Melniker and Uslan's attorney as "two popcorns and two Cokes." Uslan later stated that total revenues from Batman had topped $2 billion and that he had "not seen a penny more than that since our net profit participation has proved worthless."

  Sam Hamm, whose original script sparked so much of what the film became, returned decades later to write Batman '89, a DC comic book continuation illustrated by Joe Quinones, which introduced a new Robin and brought Billy Dee Williams' Harvey Dent into the transformation that the 1989 film had long promised but never delivered.