Why Tim Burton's 'Batman' was a gift and a curse for the superhero genre

The modern Batman leaped into the pop cultural consciousness in February 1986, a vaguely recognizable silhouette backlit by a bolt of lightning. This was the strikingly minimalist cover of “The Dark Knight Returns” issue No. 1, and if you weren’t a diehard comic book reader, you might’ve had some questions — namely, whence was Batman returning? He hadn’t gone anywhere. If you twirled a carousel in your local drug store, you’d find no shortage of Batman comics featuring the Caped Crusader rumbling with his Rogues Gallery of villains. You probably wouldn’t buy them, however, and that was the problem. Batman needed retooling. He needed to get back to his noir-ish roots and, most importantly, cast off the campy tone of the hit ABC series that had come to define the character for an entire generation.

Batman needed to be dangerous again. He needed to reconnect with the pain and anguish of the young Bruce Wayne who watched his parents get gunned down by a random thug outside a movie theater. He needed to be less Adam West and a helluva lot more Clint Eastwood.

That is the Batman writer/illustrator Frank Miller delivered to DC Comics in the mid-1980s — a 55-year-old out-to-pasture vigilante based on Dirty Harry who was enraged back to action by the rampant criminality that has once again overrun Gotham City. His city. Grim, gritty and graphically violent, Miller’s four-issue masterpiece was also rousingly mythic, a righteous distillation of everything we loved (or forgot we loved) about the character. Mainstream book critics reviewed the graphic novel as if it were the latest from John Updike. Batman was not only back, he was respectable — and this makeover was about to reverberate throughout the culture.

Warner Brothers took note of its massive sales and subsequent Batman runs (e.g. Miller’s “Year One”) and prioritized a big-screen adaptation. The studio assigned its in-house wunderkind, Tim Burton (“Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” and “Beetlejuice”), to apply his pop-gothic sensibility to the property, and Burton in turn brought on “Never Cry Wolf” screenwriter Sam Hamm to write the script. Jack Nicholson was given $6 million and a chunk of the gross profits to play The Joker. Michael Keaton created the first fanboy casting stir when he was cast against comedic type as Bruce Wayne. A June 23, 1989 release was set. Producer Jon Peters commissioned the film’s brilliant production designer, Anton Furst, to design a trompe l'oeil twist on the Batman logo for the teaser poster: no names, no title — just the Batman symbol and the release date. By the fall of 1988, Hamm’s draft of the screenplay began turning up at comic book conventions all over the country; kids in the middle of nowhere could blow two weeks’ allowance to, they believed, know the precise plot of Burton’s fervently anticipated film. 

After a decade of bad ideas and false starts, Batman was barreling ahead to the big screen. And, miraculously, if Hamm’s script was to be trusted, comic fans were getting a serious, semi-dark Caped Crusader not too far off from the new Miller mold.

Almost a year’s worth of unremitting hype primed the pump for a then-unimaginable opening weekend of $40 million at the domestic U.S. box office. Critics were generally selective in their praise (alas, Hamm’s tight-as-a-drum script had been scaled back and muddled as a result), but they recognized Burton’s film signified a sea change for the genre. Superhero movies were supposed to be bright and hopeful and, save for Richard Donner’s 1978 “Superman,” downright awful (see: “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace,” “Supergirl,” “Red Sonja,” “Sheena” “Howard the Duck” and “The Punisher” — or, better yet, don’t); Furst’s frantically overbuilt art deco dystopia (complemented by Danny Elfman’s heroic/horrific score) was more Fritz Lang than Bob Kane. This wasn’t the rubble-strewn, gang-ridden Gotham City of “The Dark Knight Returns,” but it was plenty forbidding in its own right — more of a crypt than a city.

The timing was fortuitous for the comic book industry, which — thanks to myriad adult-skewing Batman series like “Watchmen” and “The Sandman” — was entering its Modern Age. Though it would be years before the studios figured out how to adapt these monumental works for mainstream audiences, Burton’s “Batman” would serve as a stylistic lodestar. Let the auteur stray too far from the source material (as Burton did with his kinky “Batman Returns”) or, worse, lean too heavily into camp (which is how Joel Schumacher buried the “Batman” franchise for more than seven years), and you’ll lose that commercially crucial four-quadrant audience. Treat these superheroes with reverence. Beset them with tragedy. Don’t let them have fun.

Christopher Nolan observed this dour directive to moviegoers’ delight with his “Batman Begins,” “The Dark Knight” and “The Dark Knight Rises,” and when “Thor” and “Captain America: The First Avenger” failed to break $200 million domestically, the Marvel Cinematic Universe followed suit. The heavier, the better. Of course, it’s the nature of drama to raise stakes (and the real world is certainly complying with some horrifying stake-raising of its own), but there’s an expectation nowadays that every superhero film — be it DC or Marvel — must deliver some earth-shattering, end-of-the-world drama. This isn’t to suggest that the next Avengers movie should revolve around the team rescuing a cat from a tree (like Christopher Reeve’s "Superman" did once upon a time — before Donner decided to punctuate this touching moment with a comedic bit of corporal punishment), but maybe they could unite for an “Ocean’s Eleven”-style heist (which is what the last two “Ant Man” movies have done on a delightfully smaller scale).

It’s been 30 years since Tim Burton’s “Batman” firmly established that superhero movies can be dark and moody and wildly profitable, but that needn’t be the go-to vibe. Over the last three decades, the most enjoyable moment of any superhero movie resides in “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” wherein Earth’s Tipsiest Heroes try to lift Thor’s hammer. A little less brooding, a little more goofing around. The world could use it right about now.