My pick is Stephan Hopkins.
He's was a decent action/crime/thriller director with cool visuals like Predator 2 and Nightmare on Elm Street 5
John Waters
shareSam Rami or Joe Dante
shareWB obviously wanted a new vision at the time and it worked out for them...for awhile.
And considering the amount of love and reboots and such it obviously worked out for them.
I highly doubt a Tim Burton sequel would have made as much money for the studio as Joel's version did. With or without Keaton.
Val Kilmer becoming Batman was a major story. Jim Carrey was the hottest star in Hollywood at the time. Tommy Lee Jones was a major star at the time.
I know that until his dying day, Joel Schumacher got a lot of crap for Batman & Robin, but to be brutally honest with you, he was probably the right guy at the right time for Batman. Keep in mind, that Batman was at the time, Warner Bros.' main cash-cow, tentpole franchise.
Batman Returns didn't make as much money at the box office as they had hoped and expected back in 1992. While it still made money, it wasn't even close to the money that the 1989 movie made. And naturally, Tim Burton was the fall guy because he would only come back to direct if he was given creative carte blanche. But Batman Returns only wound up pissing off parental groups over concerns that its content was too dark, gruesome, and overtly sexual.
Warner Bros. I assume, thought that they needed a director who wasn't going to "rock the boat" too much. And Joel Schumacher did have a talent and ability of being able to tackle just about any kind of genre. Plus, he had a reputation for being very easy to get along and work with as well as keeping budgets reasonably in-line.
And if you look at some of his earlier, horror-like films like The Lost Boys and Flatliners, they did have a flare for delivering an impressive visual style. And of course, great visuals go hand-in-hand with superhero comics. So it isn't like he didn't have any sort of talent like I said.
It's too bad that Warren Beatty didn't direct more stuff outside of his own projects. I love what he did with Dick Tracy and the world that he created. Even now, I'm blown away by the color schemes and set design. It literally looked like a comic strip come to life. Beatty even got Danny Elfman on board to conduct the music if it the apparent Batman mining wasn't enough.
I would've loved to have seen a Batman movie that was more overtly set in the 1930s (instead of the vague, past meets present, 1940s/1980s-early '90s timeline in the Tim Burton movies) but with the look of the 1990 Dick Tracy movie. I said before that the Joel Schumacher movies (especially Batman & Robin) should've taken the approach of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy movie. What I meant is that it's decidedly campy and over-the-top (especially Al Pacino's performance) but it still has its own internal logic and takes itself very seriously. In other words, it's not going out of its way to make cheap jokes at Batman's expense or harm the integrity of the character.
That's a great choice. Beatty could've done something very cool with it, although he probably would've wanted to cast himself (not that that would be an awful choice, he just would've been a bit old for it).
I really enjoyed the "timeless" world that Burton gave us, but it would've been cool to see an actual '30s/'40s Batman.
Warren Beatty typically made passion projects for himself. I doubt that he would've been willing to direct something outside of his personal lane. Even Dick Tracy, which was his most overtly "commercial" film, was something a labor of love for him. To this day, Beatty has a tight grip on the film rights to the Dick Tracy character.
shareYeah, I think it's a bit of a shame that Beatty won't loosen that grip, even a little bit, so we could get a little more Di- uh... well, get a little more... Tracy.
They should re-release Dick Tracy into theatres. It's grossly under-appreciated. It did the "living comic book" thing so well (and about a decade before Sin City got the credit for that), and every element is perfect or darn close. It's one of my top-10 comic book films.
The soundtrack is great, the songs are great, the performances are pitch-perfect (a little melodramatic, a little cartoony, mostly played straight). The costumes, the sets, the action sequences - all beautiful. Plus, it's filled with crackerjack lines. "No grief for Lips?" "I'm wearing black underwear."
Andrew Davis would have been a good choice since he would have just come off The Fugitive which also starred Tommy Lee Jones, and that film was set in Chicago, which later was the location used for Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.
shareChicago was a terrible choice, though. Gotham in The Dark Knight lost its Gothic flavour, and it's one of the very, very few flaws in that film.
shareJohn Waters.
shareWell, there's a choice; it'd certainly be unique.
shareLike all John Waters movies, everyone would fight throughout the movie and then realize they should all just have a party and everything will be all right.
shareI feel like that would be a goofy, cult hit (eventually), but it would never really be a Batman movie.
It'd be more like The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins where you watch it, barely able to process what you're seeing, and just go, "Wow, I guess somebody made that..."
My picks would have been Sam Raimi, Stephan Hopkins, Joe Johnston or Joe Dante.
I'd say Michael Keaton would stay since each of these guys would have had a better direction than Schumacher had. If Raimi directed then he can have Bruce Campbell in a role. Still if Keaton didn't return then potential replacements could still include Keanu Reeves, Alec Baldwin, Kurt Russell, William Baldwin, etc