The Batman Re-watch Project-Part One - A little history !!!!

On July 20th, the third and final Christopher Nolan Batman film: The Dark Knight Rises will be released. Granted it will only be a matter of time before it gets rebooted so DC can finally have the Justice League movie that nerds have been begging for since Marvel showed that a superhero team movie can be done and done well. Until than we should just enjoy what we have. With the release of this final movie, I was feeling a bit nostalgic for the 1st run of the Batman series. So to prepare for the final movie...for now... I'm going to sit down and re-watch Batman. Yes all it. From 1989's Batman to The Dark Knight to the animated series and if I get a chance to read some of the comics that the world is based on. So let's dig in to the granddaddy of this series the Tim Burton's Batman.

Since the release of Nolan's films people have turned around and have been at least in my opinion have been negative towards this film. It's rather unfair, this isn't a bad movie....trust me we'll talk about the train wreck known as Batman and Robin later. The comparisons to the first Batman movie and to Nolan's movies come from two places.

1. This is Batman's Origin story
2. The Joker.

Comparing Nolan's Batman to Burton's Batman is like comparing apples to oranges in some cases. These are two very different directors who wanted to tell two very different stories with a different version of how they saw these characters. But credit should be given where credit is due, if not for Burton taking Batman in the direction he took it in, Nolan might not have gotten the chance to have his run at Batman.

It took over ten years and was also one of the most expensive movies created when it came out in 1989. This was the first time that Batman was being treated as a 'dark' character unlike the 1960's TV show that the general public was used to seeing.  It got a lot of flax for people they had attached to the project. Burton was just coming off Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice and they handed him on of the biggest budgets ever seen at that time 30 to 48 million dollars. Keaton's casting earned them scorn in The Wall Street Journal and over 50,000 hate letters to come to the studio People sat down and hand wrote the hate they felt for this. Even now I still hear people bitching about Keaton's casting as Batman. I'm really not sure why, he's not a bad actor and he turned in a very watchable performance. Even now Keaton, Bale and Kevin Conroy (The voice of the animated Batman) are in my mind the three best Batman. *I am ready for the hate and vile to come my way* The making of this movie was an uphill battle, but once the trailer was release and the marketing started the hate turned around and the fan boys lined up to see this and it ended grossing 43.6 million in America on it's first weekend and was one of the first films to earn $100 million in ten days. While this seems like pennies to what today's movie cost and gross this was the late 80's so this amount of money was mind blowing.

This was not planned to be a franchise, it was planned as a one shot deal so the fact that we got three movies after it (some better than others) is surprising. The 80's were known for horror movie squeals and the last Superman film had come out in 1987  those had been planned as a two film deal and than the last two failed in the eyes of the public. So getting this movie out the door and earning what it did was amazing at the time and it set the stage for the super hero movies we have today. It helped create the type of  marketing we have for blockbuster movies now and they did this before the Internet and managed to stop haters from hating.

So next time...a review of the 1st Batman