In the 30 years since it hit theaters, virtually every superhero movie has been influenced
by what was first accomplished in Batman '89.
Its impact has been so massive that in a world where it set the standards, you might not
have even noticed how much of an effect it had.
For those of you who don't remember what it was like back in the days leading up to June
23, 1989, it cannot be stressed enough that Batman was everywhere that summer.
Even in a year crowded with massively successful franchise movies like Indiana Jones and the
Last Crusade Ghostbusters II, Back to the Future II and the beginning of the "Disney
Renaissance" with The Little Mermaid, the Dark Knight was pop culture's most inescapable
character.
Of course, movie marketing had existed for as long as movies had, but the Batman marketing
was on a whole different level.
There were countless tie-ins, from toys to breakfast cereals to a concept album by Prince,
all of which arrived with some of the strongest branding ever.
Rather than putting the spotlight on director Tim Burton, stars Michael Keaton and Jack
Nicholson, or even the character of Batman himself, the marketing was overwhelmingly
focused on the iconic image of Batman's emblem.
It started with the first poster, which was just the emblem and a release date, and continued
across countless t-shirts, hats, action figures, and pretty much everything else in the meantime.
Even the opening sequence of the movie itself was just an extreme close-up of that logo
underneath the credits.
By reducing the entire idea of Batman down to that symbol, using the branding that had
already been refined over the past 50 years of comics and pop culture, Warner Bros. seared
that image into moviegoers' minds and sold an estimated $500 million in merchandise alone.
Adjusting for inflation, that's over $1 billion today, all before we even get to the box office
take for the movie itself.
"Hubba hubba hubba, money money money, who do ya trust?
Me?
I'm givin' away free money!"
For a movie about a character famously known for being super-competent at crime-fighting
and having a plan for every eventuality, one of the weirdest moments of Batman '89 comes
right at the beginning.
The very first thing we see Batman do after he glides silently onto a rooftop to confront
two criminals who have just committed a mugging is get shot and fall down.
Seriously: this is our introduction to the Dark Knight, finally returning to the big
screen for the first time in 23 years.
To be fair, the crucial element here is that after being shot, Batman gets back up.
It also showcases one of the movie's changes to Batman: his costume isn't just a costume,
it's bulletproof body armor.
"Wait a minute what is that?”
“Some kinda body armor."
"He's human after all!"
Before the movie, Batman's costume had usually been depicted as being, well, a costume, meant
to frighten criminals more than to protect the person wearing it.
The filmmakers apparently assumed that an audience could accept rocket cars and killer
clowns, but believing that someone could fight crime without ever taking a bullet to the
chest was a little too tough to believe.
That sparked a trend in superhero movies towards going to great lengths to give a functional
justification for why the superheroes were wearing these costumes.
It's easy to draw a direct line from Batman's body armor to the way the X-Men talked about
their leather suits in the year 2000…
"You actually go outside in these things?"
"What would you prefer, yellow spandex?"
.... and all the way through the conversation in 2017's Justice League about how the Flash's
costume was made from space shuttle parts.
If there's one thing superhero movies love, it's an origin story, and Batman '89 is no
exception.
In fact, it doesn't just stop with one origin.
It gives us two.
Not only are we treated to the first of many times that we'll see the Wayne Family's ill-fated
trip down Crime Alley on the big screen, but most of the plot revolves around another fateful
story about who a character is and how they came to be: the Joker.
"Terrorizes?
Wait'll they get a load of me."
Unlike the comics, where his identity has always been shrouded in mystery to the point
of having conflicting origins, the movie gave us the straightforward story of Jack Napier,
whose nearly unforgivable pun name and lucky deck of cards lead him to take the identity
of the Joker.
It seems like an odd choice, if only because there's no real change to the character after
he takes his ill-fated acid bath.
He's already a killer with a thing for playing cards and a wardrobe full of purple suits;
his emergence as the Joker just makes his crimes a little more artistic.
"Gentlemen… let's broaden our minds."
Batman '89's most crucial plot change was making Jack Napier the crook who shot Batman's
parents.
That's never been a part of the comics, where the Waynes were shot by a mugger named Joe
Chill, as we would eventually see in Batman Begins.
The intent here was to give Batman a personal connection to his arch-enemy that would go
beyond just criminal vs. crimefighter, which brought the superheroic story more in line
with a traditional action movie.
"You killed my parents
What?
Haha.
What are you talking about?"
"I made you, you made me first."
That set the tone for virtually every superhero movie that came after, with personal connections
built into heroes and villains, even when they never existed in the comics.
In Iron Man, for instance, Obadiah Stane wasn't just the rival businessman that readers knew
from the comics , he was a father figure for Tony Stark who betrayed him.
Along the same lines, the Erik Killmonger seen in the Black Panther movie has a familial
tie to T'Challa that his comic book counterpart never did.
"Hey Auntie."
That's not limited to superheroes, either.
This idea also had an effect on the Joker.
While Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight retained the character's mysterious,
often conflicting origins, the upcoming Joker solo film is doing the exact opposite.
It's even set to include both Thomas and Bruce Wayne as characters, giving Joaquin Phoenix's
Joker the same sort of personal connection to Batman that we saw in 1989.
In the comics, Batman has traditionally been depicted as a character who doesn't kill his
enemies, if only because it's pretty tough for the Riddler to show up again for his next
story if Batman kicks his head off in this one.
In the movie, however, he racks up a body count that doesn't just rival the Joker's,
it goes well beyond it.
He shoots at his opponents with vehicle-mounted machine guns, blows up a factory full of goons
with Batmobile bombs, tosses a dude to his death from a bell tower, and, in the end,
has a pretty direct hand in killing the Joker as revenge for the Joker murdering his parents.
That idea, of treating superhero stories like action movies, where the ending always comes
with the death of the bad guy, didn't necessarily start with Batman.
Nine years earlier, Superman II ended with the Man of Steel tossing the Phantom Zone
Criminals down a bottomless pit in the Fortress of Solitude.
Still, Batman codified it, setting up a pattern of supervillains dying at the end of movies,
often at the hands of the good guys, that wouldn't really be subverted until Spider-Man:
Homecoming, where the villain whose life gets spared at the end is played by...
Michael Keaton.
When you think of Gotham City, the image that comes to mind is a sprawling, smoke-filled
urban nightmare.
It's a place with deep shadows and gargoyles leering down from every building, where clean
Art Deco designs are shoved right up against buildings that might as well be modern gothic
castles.
It's a city that seems built for a character like Batman, and that's an idea that pretty
much starts with this movie.
Gotham City has, of course, always had its share of character, but it was mostly meant
to be relatively realistic.
As longtime Batman writer and editor Denny O'Neil put it, Gotham was
"Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night
in November."
All of that changed with the film.
Tim Burton's greatest strength has always been in his distinctive visuals, and he and
production designer Anton Furst put that on display in Batman '89.
They recreated Gotham as an environment that was less like the New York you could actually
visit and more like, as Burton memorably described it, a city where "hell burst through the pavement
and grew."
The aesthetic stuck, too Furst's designs were quickly incorporated into the comics canon
in 1990, and Gotham has retained that distinctly hellish character ever since.
In 1978, Superman the Movie brought the Man of Steel to our world; in 1989, Burton and
Furst took us to Batman's city instead.
In a lot of ways, Batman '89 was far more inspired by the '60s TV show than the comics
of the '80s, with its brightly colored knockout gas, dutch angles, and over-the-top villains.
These are all elements that hearken back to Adam West's tenure as the Caped Crusader,
which makes a lot of sense.
As much as the late '80s brought in groundbreaking comics like The Dark Knight Returns and Batman:
Year One, decades of syndication had cemented the show as the most prominent version of
the character in the larger pop culture.
Burton did, however, draw influence from further back in Batman's history.
In an effort to evoke the character's roots, the style of the movie is largely inspired
by the fashions and aesthetics of the 1940s.
It's clearly set in the modern day there are computers, modern cars, and, you know, Prince
but characters like Jack Napier and Alex Knox wear distinctly '40s-style suits, complete
with hats.
Even Harvey Dent's campaign for District Attorney is a visual reference to Citizen Kane.
The overall effect is that the movie's visuals are a very interesting blend of Batman's past
and present, but in retrospect, it also serves as a sort of proof-of-concept for the superhero
movie as a period piece.
It would take years for this to really pay off, but it's hard to imagine a world where
we got to movies like Captain America: The First Avenger or X-Men: First Class without
Batman paving the way for superheroes with a retro aesthetic.
Imagine that you're the head of a movie studio in July of 1989.
Batman is everywhere, and you've watched while it took ten days to become the fastest movie
to ever rack up $100 million at the box office.
You want another piece of that massive success.
Obviously, the best thing to do here is to make more superhero movies and capitalize
on the characters that the public already loves, right?
"You… are my number one guy."
Wrong.
If you're making movies in 1989, you apparently look at the two highest grossing movies of
the year, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Batman, and decide that moviegoers are
just into movies about stuff that was popular in the '30s and '40s.
The years after Batman's titanic success saw a sudden flood of movies that attempted to
capitalize on what studios clearly hoped was a trend.
Dick Tracy in 1990, The Shadow in 1994, and The Phantom in 1996 were all revivals of characters
who had been hugely popular five decades earlier that leaned into their pulpy aesthetics.
The Rocketeer in 1991 and The Mask in 1994 were both based on newer comics that had been
created in the '80s, but that were brought to the screen with the same kind of retro
'40s visuals.
It even extended to TV, where Darkwing Duck secret identity: Drake Mallard hit airwaves
in 1991 as a full-on parody of The Shadow secret identity: Kent Allard a character with
whom its target audience had zero familiarity.
Unfortunately for the studio executives who really wanted audiences to love the Phantom
like they did when they were eight, this was a false-start of a trend to jump on.
While there were some good movies in that throwback crop, none were as memorable, beloved,
or even remotely as successful as Batman.
It turned out that the public was far less interested in characters who hit their pop
cultural peak 50 years ago than they were in actual superhero stories, and it would
take another decade or two for movie studios to come around to that one.
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