Tuesday marks the exact anniversary (June 23rd) of Burton's movie - a film that broke box office records despite many people expecting it to disappear without trace as soon as it opened. Instead, it opened the door for three sequels with different levels of diminishing return, a classic cartoon series, numerous bad superhero movies and a summer where it seemed like everything had a Bat logo on it. If there truly was life before Burton's Batman (and we only have science's word and our own faulty memories that there was) one thing's for sure - it was certainly a lesser place without the sounds of Prince's "Batdance" available for us to listen to.

To do our part to mark the 20th anniversary of the movie, we've looked back at the making of the movie, remembered some of our favorite merchandise from the Summer of the Bat, thought about the disasters that were made as a result of its success, and tried to think of the good things about each of the sequels. Feel free to join in, but if we hear someone doing the "this town needs an enema" line, we're turning this nostalgiafest around right now.

Batman Returns

There are many who think that Burton's second Batman is his best, and I have to admit that I'm one of them. For one thing, it's just weirder, dropping a lot of the compromise from the first to form a messier, funnier movie where Keaton doesn't have to fight for attention next to a scenery-chewing Nicholson (Not that Danny DeVito's Penguin isn't almost as bad). Yes, it doesn't have the clearest narrative in the world, but I fully and only slightly shamefully admit that the 17-year-old me didn't care about that as long as Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman was onscreen.

Batman Forever

Burton vacated the director's chair for the third movie (He stuck around as producer, however), leading to Keaton also leaving the series to pursue "more interesting" roles. Enter Joel Schumacher and Val Kilmer, and the beginning of the end. You can see the potential in all of their choices, even as the execution didn't live up to it: Trying to go for a new visual aesthetic instead of aping Burton was a good idea, but the neon dayglo look they came up with definitely wasn't. Similarly, the media-mocking of the plot (The Riddler's television-replacement device literally being an idiot box and sapping the intelligence of its audience) had potential, but the overly broad acting of Jim Carrey as the Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face brought everything down to a farce-like level that reminded people a little too much of the Adam West days.

Batman and Robin

...And this was where the franchise ended, thanks to Schumacher's attempts to "homage" Adam West and Dick Sprang going horribly awry. To his credit, the director apparently wanted the movie to be much more like a cartoon than the earlier installments, but with toy companies having input into the design of the movie's costumes and characters this time around, maybe things got a little out of hand from his original intentions (Whether the toy companies were in favor of the much-ridiculed nipple additions to the Batsuits is unknown, if unlikely). Not helping things was the arrival of Batgirl, bringing the lead cast to a cramped five characters (Batman, Robin, Batgirl and two villains Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy, the last two masterclasses in overacting from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Uma Thurman). And yet, despite Schumacher himself apologizing for the movie on an extra from the recent DVD reissue, there's something weirdly compelling about it. I demand a critical re-appraisal!

(There's arguably a case to be made for the idea that Batman's success drove new readers and, perhaps more importantly, movie and television producers to the medium, leading to the early 1990s speculator boom and subsequent bust, but that's another article in itself.)

The Movies
If there's one thing Hollywood likes more than a hit, it's a formula for more hits, and Batman's success convinced movie executives that they could do exactly the same thing with whatever comic character they wanted (Even if, in Robert Townsend's case, he had to make him up). The result? Lots of bad movies, made with less love and less talent than Burton brought to Batman. Exhibit A: Warren Beatty's garish, flat Dick Tracy:


Also, see The Phantom:


...And Meteor Man?


Not all of the comic-based movies were terrible, of course; I still adore The Rocketeer:


Goths the world over loved The Crow:


And who can forget Marvel Comics' ill-fated early attempts to get into the movie biz? Look! Here's the direct-to-video Captain America:


Or even better, the direct-to-bootleg Roger Corman Fantastic Four:


Looking at some of these, I'm kind of glad that Batman and Robin accidentally killed the genre for a few years.

The Best Thing To Have Come From The Success Of The Movie
Surely there's no contest, right...?


Batman: The Animated Series (AKA The Adventures of Batman & Robin and The New Batman Adventures, amongst other names it had during its brief but wonderful life) may have gained from the success of Tim Burton's movies - it premiered in 1992, following the release of Batman Returns, but had been in the works long before - but it wasn't a copy by any stretch of the imagination. Dark without being humorless, endlessly stylish thanks to the talents of Bruce Timm, Dan Riba and many others and much smarter than other Saturday morning cartoons (or, for that matter, many other incarnations of Batman), Batman: The Animated Series defined the character for a generation, and remains an example of how good an animated series can be.

Maybe you'd like to see the original animation that got the series greenlit...?

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 and if you were a comic book fan it was pretty hot.

Contemporary estimates suggested that over $500 million worth of merchandise was sold for the first movie, with some suggesting the number was closer to $750 million - but then, there was a lot of bootleg merchandise available at the time. While merchandise had been a large part of the summer movie business since George Lucas made a fortune from Star Wars' ancillerary products, the blanketing of the Bat was something different: Starting, perhaps, as uncertainty on behalf of Warner Bros over whether the film itself would recoup costs, it became a genuine craze somewhere along the line - leading to all manner of random Batproduct on the market. Even before the movie opened, analysts knew something big was happening:

''Batman'' does not reach theaters until June 23, but market research surveys have shown an extraordinary awareness on the part of moviegoers for the last month. '' 'Batman' is the movie equivalent of 'Phantom of the Opera,' '' said Jack Brodsky, the president of marketing and distribution at Morgan Creek. ''It jumped onto the research charts in first place. That's like being No. 1 on the best-seller list your first week.''

Mr. Vogel thinks ''Batman'' could sell $300 million worth of merchandise. The comic-book character has been around for 50 years and the Caped Crusader appeals to adults as well as children. Although Warner Brothers has been secretive about the merchandising of the movie before it opens, Licensing Corporation of America, a subsidiary of Warner Communications Inc., has already mailed out thousands of catalogues hawking everything from Batman playing cards to a $499.95 jacket with the Batman logo ''studded with rhinestones.''

And, even if you weren't willing to pay $500 for a rhinestone jacket - or just had enough taste to not want a rhinestone jacket in the first place - there was still an embarrassment of Bat-riches available. For example, you could buy a bumper sticker allowing you to pretend that you were really Bruce Wayne:

Alternatively, if you really wanted, you could just buy the Batmobile itself. It even has "2 concealed rockets"!

If you were hungry, there was always some Bat-cereal to get your day started properly -


- and if you needed a snack during the day, your Bathead candy dispenser was sure to help you out:


Batman could also help with your leisure activities - you could play the arcade game or the pinball game...


... and, if you felt the need to spend your evening dancing instead of fighting crime, Prince was there to help you out with what may have been one of his last hurrahs before disappearing into self-pleasuring obscurity (Sorry, Prince fans. But you know that I'm right):

And then, you could unwind before sleep with the movie's second soundtrack release, the Danny Elfman score. Which, I have to admit, reminds me much more of the animated series now than the movie... But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Images from Batman Movie Online

If Burton as director was seen as a risky move because of resume up until that point, his casting of Michael Keaton as the lead character was assumed by many to just be outright suicide. It also wasn't just the comic fans who were scared about the idea of someone known more as a comedic actor taking on the role (50,000 letters of complaint were apparently sent to Warner Bros as a result), as executive producer Jon Peters recalls:

One of the most powerful men in Hollywood went as far as to call Warners' chairman Steve Ross and tell him casting Michael was such a horrible idea it would bring Warners to its knees... The entire studio would crash. Heaven's Gate revisited.

(I have to wonder what the response would have been if Bill Murray, another of the actors under consideration for the role alongside more traditional candidates like Mel Gibson, Pierce Brosnan and Kevin Costner, had been cast.)

The casting of Jack Nicholson as the Joker, however, met with much less anger (Other actors considered included Robin Williams, James Woods and, in what could have been either awesome or the worst decision ever, David Bowie), even if many - including screenwriter Sam Hamm - disliked the retcon that revealed that Jack Napier, the young Joker, was the man that killed Bruce Wayne's parents; that change in the story happened during shooting, when the 1988 WGA Writers Strike prevented Hamm from working on rewrites himself.

(Here's the first production draft of the script and, for fun comparison, Hamm's original 1986 draft.)

The production was troubled, to say the least. As well as the Writers Strike, the four month shoot - described later by Burton as "[t]he worst period of my life" - also saw producers change the end of the movie without telling Burton, the budget spiral out of control - it was rumored to end up more than 50% higher than it was when it started - and footage stolen from the set, as the press fought to be the first to have pictures from the secretive set. Even in the movie's pre-release publicity, the stress was clear as this Time Magazine story demonstrates:

As in all megaprojects, the Batman people were just happy to have survived. "Tim is a pale guy," his friend Keaton says. "Put him in England and add the demands of the shoot, and he becomes transparent." But Burton soldiered on, and now offers a cautious commendation of his own work: "Given the scale, the number of people involved and how quickly we did it, it still has a personality, which big movies often lose. It doesn't feel like a cardboard clone."

Early reviews for the movie were mixed; while some enjoyed the dark tone, others felt as if the darkness overwhelmed everything else. Roger Ebert, for example:

[D]id I care about the relationship between these two caricatures? Did either one have the depth of even a comic book character? Not really. And there was something off-putting about the anger beneath the movie's violence. This is a hostile, mean-spirited movie about ugly, evil people, and it doesn't generate the liberating euphoria of the Superman or Indiana Jones pictures... The movie's problem is that no one seemed to have any fun making it, and it's hard to have much fun watching it. It's a depressing experience.

Time Magazine's take was similarly damning:

Batman's style is both daunting and lurching; it has trouble deciding which of its antagonists should set the tone. It can be as manic as the Joker, straining to hear the applause of outrage; it can be as implosive as Batman-Bruce, who seems crushed by the burden of his schizoid eminence. This tension nearly exhausts the viewer and the film.

Nonetheless, the film was a runaway success, much moreso than Warners had anticipated - its opening broke box office records (It was the first movie to earn more than $100 million in its first ten days), and by the end of the year, it had become the sixth most successful movie of all time. The moral of this story? Perhaps, to let Tim Burton do whatever he wants - unless that happens to be remaking Planet of the Apes.

In its second weekend, Batman Begins only lost about 44 percent of its box office take, compared with a 63 percent drop-off for Batman And Robin. (And Superman Returns had a 58.5 percent drop-off.) So a lot depends, for the Hulk, on word-of-mouth and reviews. Can the Hulk crush Maxwell Smart this weekend? Few reviewers seem to be saying the Hulk is as great as Batman Begins, and it's possible most of the die-hard fans have seen TIH already. My guess is Hulk will end up doing almost as well as Superman Returns, which is nothing to sneeze at.

The other big surprise success of the weekend was M. Night Shyamalan's much-maligned The Happening, which scored $30.3 million, better than Unbreakable and Lady In The Water. The film will probably make back its $50 million budget, but its success may just hasten the slow death of Shyamalan's career, if the people who saw it decide never to brave one of his movies again. [Box Office Prophets and Box Office Mojo]