Care to explain why then BR made only about half as much money as its predecessor then?
I suspect that BATMAN made more money than BATMAN RETURNS because more people saw BATMAN than saw BATMAN RETURNS. Simple enough, really.
Frankly, I don't care why it didn't make as much money as BATMAN. I only care about the idea that has been out there that a majority of children hated the movie. I see, and saw, as a child who watched BATMAN RETURNS, no evidence of that.
I think BATMAN was a curiousity. It became a fad, even more than something like THE DARK KNIGHT did, which has been one of the most high profile and successful films of all time. BATMAN made a ridiculous, ridiculous amount of money for a character that, while known to many people in 1989, was not all that beloved. You have to remember...there was no animated series back then. Most people of Batman through the Adam West series, and only knew of that sparingly. And most kids had seen Superfriends at some point, and there was a small percentage of the population who were die hard comic book fans...and that's really about it. It wasn't like today, where BATMAN BEGINS and THE DARK KNIGHT came into a public conscousness that has seen more serious approaches to the character, four major Batman films, something like four or five animated series, and countless toylines, videogames, etc.
I never said Batman Returns was criticized for its puns or melodrama. I'm talking about the fact that Batman Returns feeling like the bastard child of Beetlejuice and the original B89.
I see where you're going with that...but I don't think it was quite THAT weird. BATMAN had a lot of weird elements, too. It just had The Joker's brand of weirdness VS The Penguin's.
Its tone was just all over the place. One minute it is dark and serious, and in a blink of an eye becomes outlandish, ridiculous and childish.
Again, though, a majority of comic books, even the ones that were considered serious approaches, had this element in the late eighties and early 1990's as well. If your issue is that the tone of the movie is uneven...then yeah, the tone of the movie is sort of uneven. It's clearly intentional on the part of the filmmakers, not some horrible failure to keep a dramatic film in a consistent tone. When the film needed to maintain a consistent tone, it did.
Sure, there were comics at the time that were inherently silly, but there were also enough comics that were consistent in their serious and sober tone. And it is these mature stories like Year One, The Dark Knight, The Killing Joke and Arkham Asylum that were responsible for revitalizing the character's mainstream popularity at the time, not campy drivel from the pre-crisis and Adam West era that Batman is so often ridiculed for.
And it's all well and good to want those comics to be the comics the movies are/were based on...but that's just not the way it was. Nor is that the way it is. Even THE DARK KNIGHT only took a few basic elements from any of these, as did BATMAN BEGINS.
YEAR ONE, THE DARK KNIGHT, ARKHAM ASYLUM and THE KILLING JOKE are certainly great stories...but they're also not the norm in comics. In general, even after those projects came out, even after their influence started to be felt in the mainstream titles, comic books were still pretty damn silly. They alternated a bit more between serious and silly, but the only period I can think of where they were mostly serious came long, long after BATMAN RETURNS was written.
Now don't get me wrong. I honor the elements of the Batman mythology, but I love dark, serious, explorative Batman stories. I'd rather see that brought to life on film. But I'm cognizant that there was a time when the rest of the world didn't feel this way. Some people still don't.
Sure, people may have loved it at the time for what it was - hilarious and entertaining, but the darker classic iterations of the character were what made the people to take the character seriously as a legitimately engaging superhero.
In a sense. Those classics you mentioned didn't exactly cause the general public to clamor for an uber serious third Batman movie (FOREVER was a blockbuster despite it's silliness). I don't think there were too many people looking for engagement who came out of BATMAN and BATMAN RETURNS not being engaged with Bruce Wayne/Batman himself on some level.
The issue isn't really Batman, who was the straight man in it all, and was appropriately dark in both BATMAN and BATMAN RETURNS. The issue was the villains. The Penguin was ridiculous. And he was ridiculous because he'd always been ridiculous. Batman's rogues, for a long, long time, were mostly zany, ridiculous psychopaths. The Joker was ridiculous in BATMAN, and it worked. Penguin was then ridiculous in RETURNS, and it...sort of worked. Catwoman wasn't too ridiculous comparatively speaking, so I don't consider her much of an issue with RETURNS.
So even if you make the argument that Burton picked the silliness from the comics, it doesn't make him look any better because it seems he picked from the bottom of the litter. It's okay to have a few lighthearted moments or a few tongue-in-cheek one liners in a predominantly serious film to lighten the mood (like B89) but it's a whole different thing for a film to come off just as juvenile as it is mature.
I don't feel RETURNS came off as entirely juvenile, save for a few short sequences, many of which were in character, and had a darker undertone to the juvenile antics. I would debate that heartily.
Do not make the foolish assumption that anyone who dreads the excess of campy and silliness of Batman stories completely hates anything and everything even slightly cheesy altogether.
I don't recall doing so.
Just because someone likes Batman does not mean they have to love everything associated with the character throughout its history. If I or anyone else happens to completely despise the Adam West Batman, it doesn't make one any less of a fan. It simply means they like one iteration of the character over the other. Besides, Batman was originally a darker character, was he not?
Yes, but again...unless you just weren't around in 1992, you will remember the nature of the comics of the era, and of movies in general.
Batman wasn't the uber-dark, serious comic book character he became later on.
Perhaps too cognizant, because there was simply too much of it than what was necessary.
I guess that depends. I thought most of the zaniness and the various weird element fit the characters quite well as they were written, if not in comparison to an entirely serious adaption of their comic book counterparts. I guess I'd need specific examples of what you think was "too much".
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