“I think [Bat nipples] that will be on my gravestone. It’s how I’ll be remembered,” Joel Schumacher reflected a few years ago. Indeed, despite directing a string of hits before it arrived, “Batman & Robin,” remains one of the more infamous entries in the comic book movie canon, and a stain on the director’s resume. Still, even though he’s taken a beating from fans and while the film continues to be a punchline, Schumacher remains philosophical about it all.
Vice caught up with the director as “Batman & Robin” turns twenty, and he explains how despite knowing better, he took on the Bat-sequel anyway.
“You know, I just knew not to do a sequel ever. If you get lucky walk away. But everybody at Warner Brothers just expected me to do one, and maybe it was some hubris on my part. I had a batting average of 1.000 here and so I went from falling down a bit after ‘Lost Boys‘ to a kind of a genius with ‘The Client,’ a big blockbuster with ‘Batman Forever,’ then ‘A Time to Kill,’ so my batting average was good,” he explained. “I never planned on being, that dreadful quote, ‘a blockbuster king’ because my other films were much smaller and had just found success with the audience and not often with the critics, which is really why we wrote them. And then after ‘Batman & Robin,’ I was scum. It was like I had murdered a baby.”
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Remarkably, however, Warner Bros. didn’t care. They wanted Schumacher to come back for more because their licensed product sales took off, but the director didn’t have the stomach to soldier on.
“….I was set to do another Batman. I even met with Nic Cage on the set of ‘Face/Off‘ because I was going to have him play The Scarecrow. Frankly, I was running out of villains. At the time I was all over the world doing press, because obviously, we didn’t have Skype or electronics to do remote interviews, and let me tell you, the knives were out over ‘Batman & Robin.’ But I did my job,” Schumacher said. “So I’m in Rio, cutting the ribbon to yet another toy store with Warner Bros merchandise and I just thought… what the fuck is going on? So I went on a vacation to Mexico and I call my bosses and say, I just can’t do another Batman. You would think they wouldn’t want me to make another. But the licensing, the toys, the pajamas, they’ve produced astronomical numbers in sales. I just needed to get out of carrying the summer movie thing, for my own sanity.”
Turning down another Batman meant Schumacher had to exit his longtime home at Warner Bros., but he nonetheless owns the result of how “Batman & Robin” turned out, and feels sorry that so many were let down by the blockbuster.
“Look, I apologize,” he said. “I want to apologize to every fan that was disappointed, because I think I owe them that.”
Check out the full interview — it’s fascinating stuff — and let us know your thoughts on “Batman & Robin” in the comments section.