MovieChat Forums > Batman & Robin (1997) Discussion > What were the most crucial production mi...

What were the most crucial production mistakes that Warner Bros. and Joel Schumacher made?

posted 4 years ago by TMC-4 (20495)
17 replies | jump to latest

The first and most obvious one in my estimation, was the decision to fast track the production by a year instead the usual three year intervals that were in-between the Batman films beforehand.

This video goes further into why that was disasterous:
https://youtu.be/Gm4s5tM6Jgo

The second issue that really killed this movie was the inability to get Val Kilmer back. I think that had he and Joel Schumacher would've been able to get along better and put their differences aside, then it would've added much more credibility to the film. With George Clooney now as Batman, it was even harder to get emotionally invested, when it was the third time in a row that the leading actor had to be changed. Simply put, Clooney's relationship with Chris O'Donnell's Robin feels hallow because we first saw that particular Dick Grayson meet up and be tutored by Val Kilmer's Bruce Wayne.

[–] NGMI (1184) 4 years ago

how much do you get paid for click baiting?

[–] TMC-4 (20495) 4 years ago

Why the hell is that relevant to what I'm asking?

[–] NGMI (1184) 4 years ago

That's not a denial. How much for you to spam these boards with click bait?

[–] e3e34ifj (1912) 4 years ago

well give him credit, at least he is not complaining about every movie being leftist libtard sjw woke propoganda like 99% of this website

[–] acidraindrop (3055) 3 years ago

Definitely agree with this.

Thought it was weird the first time I found the moviechat boards...but god, at least their links/articles are fodder for functional discussion.

[–] enriquesingh (1812) 4 years ago

Nah, the studio interfered and wanted to sell happy meals and toys, that's it, that's the #1 reason, everything else is secondary... everyone involved with this production just did it for the money.

[–] Kowalski (79177) 4 years ago

YUP...I HEARD THE TOY PEOPLE WERE INVOLVED IN THE SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT AND WERE PRESENT AT MOST OF THE MAJOR MEETINGS AND WORK SESSIONS DURING PRODUCTION OF THE FILM.

[–] blue1981 (8203) 4 years ago

They made the movie to sell toys and nothing else.

[–] DoctorThirteen (15335) 4 years ago

I agree with everything you've said. Plus, as others have said, it was there to sell toys.

[–] MickyMac (3254) 4 years ago

I don't think dark and gritty would've necessarily led to a better film(after BVS you now know better) but I think it would've made a more fan pleasing one.

[–] ATG6 (3000) 4 years ago

Batman Forever had a good mix of campy and serious. Two-Face and Riddler were way over the top, but Robin's family was killed and there was a dark edge to the movie.

[–] MickyMac (3254) 4 years ago

Well Forever and B&R were only campy with the villains.

[–] TMC-4 (20495) 3 years ago

People often bring up how Batman Forever was meant to serve as a remedy for people who were upset over Batman Returns being too dark and disturbing. But even so, Batman Forever like you said, still had a dark edge to it. Maybe had Warner Bros. not forced Joel Schumacher to cut out significant parts of the story (like the subplot about Bruce's father's red diary or Two-Face escaping from Arkham Asylum), it would've been closer to par with the first two ones by Tim Burton.

And the stuff with Chase Meridian, even if it could've been handled better (and not just have Chase be depicted as some horny fan-girl for Batman), it still dealt with the psychology of Bruce Wayne and what drives and motivates him to become Batman.

The cerebral element of Batman was all but ignored or lost come Batman & Robin. A big mistake that the filmmakers made is that they went out of their way to tone down the notion that Batman is inherently, a tormented hero. Having his elderly butler get sick isn't enough to generate turmoil, especially when the movie is just going to go back to the status quo at the end.

[–] ATG6 (3000) 4 years ago

1. Making the Batsuit and Robinsuit into fetish gear.
2. Making Bane as menacing as a toy robot.
3. Casting Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl.
4. Not burning the script when they first read it.
5. Making Mr. Freeze into a caricature of a cartoon villain.
6. Played by Arnold Schwarzzenegger.
7. Turning the first big museum heist into a hockey game.
8. Putting their real names in the credits.

[–] Sidha108 (2737) 3 years ago

I would say some of the cinematography and set designs were lacking depth with everything feeling more like a stage than an actual location. Also there is a lack of a true romantic interest. Batman technically has a girlfriend but she has nothing to do with the main plot of the film and the love triangle of Ivy-Robin-Batgirl is never really explored deeply enough. Like maybe they could have had Dick romance with Pamela only for him to find out that she is actually Poison Ivy, or better yet, have a twisted romance in which Pamela goes out with Bruce while she (as Poison Ivy) romances Robin with both Dick/Robin and Bruce/Batman not realizing until towards the end that they had been dating the same woman.

[–] blue1981 (8203) 3 years ago

They shouldn't have made a movie just to sell toys.

[–] TMC-4 (20495) 3 years ago

I was reminded of what Leonard Maltin said about Star Trek V: The Final Frontier in that it was a movie, that especially early on, suffered from an awful case of the "cutes". The previous Star Trek movie, The Voyage Home, was a huge success both critically and commercially. It had the biggest box office total of all of the first ten (pre-Kelvin-verse) Trek movies. And a big reason for that was that it was appealed to non-Trekkers with its unique, fish-out-of-water comedy and temporal storyline.

But in Star Trek V, the "humor" doesn't feel so organic, so what's left is that you have Captain Kirk, Spock and company looking like utter buffoons. When you do that, you risk turning yourself into an unwanted or called for self-parody and but the characters' integrity at risk. With Batman & Robin, Joel Schumacher himself even admitted, that a big reason why the "fun and games" (in his words) aspect of the movie was so emphasized was because of the popularity of Jim Carrey and his take on the Riddler in Batman Forever.

In Batman & Robin, there's little if any "internal logic" for why certain things are happening. For example, there's no rational reason for Batman to carry around a specialized credit card other than for the movie to make a cheap American Express, "Don't leave home without it!" gag.

It's almost like a bad sitcom disguised as a Batman movie. In a way, it's like the '90s version of Superman III (and the Richard Lester directed parts of Superman II), where (again, to borrow from Leonard Maltin) it goes out of its way to trash everything that Batman is about and stands for, in order to make an endless stream of cheap jokes and sight-gags.