“Batman Forever” is known for a few things, including bringing Robin, Two-Face, and The Riddler to the big screen. It is also known for being awful. Joel Schumacher‘s first of two Batman movies that would eventually kill the franchise, before Christopher Nolan stepped in to reboot and revive it, has become an example of how to screw up comic book movies, but even from page one one, Michael Keaton had an inkling it was going to be bad.
An an interview with THR, the actor explains quite succinctly why he left the superhero series following “Batman” and “Batman Returns.”
“It sucked,” Keaton said about the script he read. “I knew it was in trouble when he [Schumacher] said, ‘Why does everything have to be so dark?’ ”
It’s not like Tim Burton‘s films were especially grim — they had their own style of primary colored fun, too — but Schumacher definitely took it in a very different direction, and the results speak for themselves.
Listen to the full conversation with Keaton below.