Upon its 1995 release, Batman Forever drew mixed-to-negative reviews, though nothing as scathing as what Batman & Robin faced. Schumacher’s Batman Forever isn’t any better than Batman & Robin, but it’s let off the hook in the “worst picture of all time” discussion because it doesn’t bear any particular stigma.
Batman & Robin damn near killed the whole superhero-movie genre, by exposing how quickly the public had grown tired of the fake-looking, cartoony, stiff approach that Hollywood at the time assumed was the only way to translate comic-book characters to the screen. That was the film that almost killed the franchise, before Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins revived it in 2005. Joel Schumacher directed two Batman movies, but the one that’s most-remembered-and not in a good way-is 1997’s Batman & Robin. Decades of continuity and character-building are reduced to one actor’s interpretation, from a movie that isn’t exactly thought of as a timeless classic. Any random Riddler figure at a flea market could be identifiable specifically as an artifact of the 1970s or the 1990s, but it’ll still be in the rough shape of the villain we’ve come to know as “The Riddler.” But a Batman Forever Riddler? Well, that’s Jim Carrey. Movie tie-in toys eliminate a lot of that abstraction, though. He’s an abstraction, open to interpretation.
Batman has been lean, muscular, gothic, futuristic, friendly, and angry. The characters have been written and drawn hundreds of different ways over the decades as superhero trends have shifted, their merchandise has changed too. There’s never been one Batman, or one Robin or Riddler. Instead, this is what our universe’s children found in toy stores in the mid-1990s:Īnd honestly? There’s nothing about those versions of the Batman heroes and villains that’s any less weird than the ones that never existed. In this alternate-timeline 1995, all these actors saw their likenesses preserved forever as action figures. Based on what was rumored, or even planned at one point or another, there might’ve been an Earth-2 Batman Forever where Tim Burton directed, Michael Keaton starred, Rene Russo was the love interest, Billy Dee Williams played Two-Face, Robin Williams was The Riddler, and Marlon Wayans was Robin.
Do just a little digging through the Variety and Hollywood Reporter archives, and you could probably piece together enough old casting notices to construct an entirely different Batman Forever.
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