![]() "Later on, my agent told me that he was going to hire bodyguards because I was a dangerous, lethal person." Burton told his side of the story in the 1995 book, Burton on Burton, claiming that he was never on the lot that day and calling Young's accusations of unfair casting practices "absurd." "He ducked me - he ran,” she later recounted on The Joan Rivers Show. The Blade Runner star famously wore a homemade Catwoman costume to confront Burton on the studio lot. Pfeiffer won the role after a public campaign by Sean Young, who was previously replaced by Kim Basinger in the first Batman. But there's another force in the mix: Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer), a mousy secretary who transforms herself into an assertive Catwoman after she's violently "fired" by her boss, and the movie's ultimately villain, Max Schreck (Christopher Walken). With their shared backstories as wealthy orphans and subsequent turn towards crime and crimefighting respectively, Oswald and Bruce are obviously on a collision course. Instead, we're greeted with a Yuletide prologue about Oswald Cobblepot, the deformed son of a prominent Gotham couple who is abandoned at birth and raised by an army of penguins to become. Working with Waters, Burton crafted what the writer calls a "strange film of strange people interacting in a city." Adding to the strangeness, the movie doesn't even begin with Batman returning. (Photo: Warner Bros./courtesy Everett Collection) "We did absolutely our own thing."ĭanny DeVito as the Penguin in Batman Returns. ![]() "He didn’t want Batman Returns to have anything to do with the first Batman," screenwriter Daniel Waters confirmed to Vulture earlier this year. Granted almost complete creative freedom by Warner Bros., the director made a conscious break with the franchise's origins. In contrast to its predecessor, Batman Returns was - and still is - a distinctly Tim Burton picture all the way. "For me, that was the big fun of writing the screenplay, trying not to do it by the numbers." "The idea was just to be constantly fighting whatever the audience’s expectations might be," Hamm told Yahoo Entertainment in 2019. That first Batman was also the product of many authors, including producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters, production designer Anton Furst, star Jack Nicholson - who tailored the Joker to fit his skill set - and screenwriter Sam Hamm, who inherited and extensively rewrote a 1983 script penned by Superman: The Movie scribe, Tom Mankiewicz. And Burton himself has noted the discrepancy between his version of "dark" and, say, The Batman's version of "dark." Speaking with Empire magazine recently, the director said: "It is funny to see this now, because all these memories come back of, 'It’s too dark.' So, it makes me laugh a little bit."īatman Returns began as a victory lap for Burton, who had successfully stage managed the 1989 original into a pop culture force after years of never-were attempts by the likes of Ivan Reitman and Bill Murray. ![]() Three decades later, concerns about the "darkness" of Batman Returns seem positively quaint, particularly in light of the grim and gritty realism that successive directors like Christopher Nolan, Zack Snyder and Matt Reeves have sought to bring to Gotham since - with varying degrees of success. (Fortunately, Michael Keaton's Bruce Wayne is rising again in two upcoming DC Extended Universe films, The Flash and Batgirl.) Of course, Forever famously had its own production difficulties, and spawned a sequel that achieved what the Joker couldn't: Kill Batman. That 1995 hit saw Joel Schumacher taking over directing duties from Burton with the express instruction to lighten the mood. to shake up the Bat-franchise for the third installment, Batman Forever. Frequently criticized as "too dark" in the run-up and immediate aftermath of its Jrelease, the film's reception spurred Warner Bros. Transforming a tuxedoed bird beloved by children into a waddling weapon is just one of the delightfully perverse elements of Batman Returns that irked a large segment of moviegoers three decades ago.
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