35 years ago, Tim Burton's Batman was the movie that teased a pop culture future owned by Marvel Studios
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This week marked, somewhat shockingly, the 35th anniversary of the release of Tim Burton’s first Batman movie — titled, helpfully, Batman. I say “shockingly,” because I remember seeing the movie in the theater on its initial release, not entirely sure what I was sitting down for but grateful for the air conditioning in the theater no matter what. The kid I was back then wasn’t entirely sure of the movie at the time; I loved a lot of it, but wasn’t sold on the thing as a whole, as I seem to remember at the time. I might be wrong, but I think I didn’t really like Jack Nicholson’s Joker, of all things…? What can I say? I was, apparently, not the smartest kid.
I mention the above not to demonstrate how old I am — my aged, wizened face does that all too well, I’m afraid — but because I remember distinctly at the time that the actual movie felt like just the smallest piece of the Batsummer of 1989, a season that was utterly bedecked by Bat-themed everythings, both in the form of official merchandise including everything from clothes to trading cards, action figures to beach towels, and themed make-up to Prince’s soundtrack album that was loosely “inspired” by the movie and all the better for the looseness. (And that’s to say nothing about the insane amount of bootleg merch created for a fast buck!) Sure, Burton’s Batman was at the center of the whole thing, trailed by a marketing campaign that featured just the Batman chest symbol and nothing else and creating an inescapable pop culture moment as a result, but the hype surrounding the idea of Batman was so loud that somehow the movie became part of the moment, rather than the center of it. The summer of 1989, basically, belonged to the Batman, and as a nascent comic book fan, I was here for it.
You have to remember; this was literally two decades before the MCU debuted, and more than a decade before Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Bryan Singer’s X-Men reintroduced the idea of superhero movies as something that audiences actually might want to see on a regular basis. Batman arrived on June 23, 1989 as a risky move on the part of Warner Bros., because the last superhero movie before that — 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace — had not been either a hit or even a particularly good movie. The idea that audiences were really going to turn out for a grim-and-gritty reboot of a character still best-known of the camp joys of the 1960s TV series (and a reboot that had comedic actor Michael Keaton in the leading role, a big deal at the time) was far-fetched during the movie’s production, even to comic book fans; that just wasn’t what happened.
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