With Joel Schumacher’s infamous Batman & Robin returning to cinemas, the 1997 quippy sequel is well-poised for a reassessment.
That favourite of broadsheet think-pieces, the nostalgia pendulum, has finally swung back into the 1990s. With 2020s blockbuster entertainment almost entirely reliant on green screen and desaturated colour palettes, rubber costumes and kids-TV-style sets feel charmingly quaint. Even the film’s contempt for its source material feels fresh when fan-service has become the raison d’être of the average blockbuster.
The reason it’s in cinemas at all, of course, is because Hollywood hasn’t been delivering the goods – literally. With screen schedules to fill and tiny numbers of studio films to do it with, the Spider-Man, Star Wars and now Batman franchises have taken the opportunity to capitalise on the franchise fare the studios already own anyway.
All of which means that even a film as universally, er, uniting as Batman & Robin is returning to the big screen in the hopes of scaring up some cash. If the success of Deadpool & Wolverine – which cheered fans no end by pointing enthusiastically at Fantastic 4 and Electra – is anything to go by, the reputation of the film we’re nostalgically pointing towards shouldn’t really matter.
This is good news for Batman & Robin, which remains, 27 years on from its release, not good. But it’s not good in a way so alien to 2024 eyes it’s very nearly refreshing.
The story of its production is pretty familiar – after the success of Batman: Forever, Warner Bros pushed the film through in a then-ridiculously short turnaround of two years. The gap was so short that the third act sees Clooney put on a modified version of Val Kilmer’s old suit – not as an easter egg, but because the art department had run out of time to build a new one.
The brief execs gave Schumacher was reportedly to make the film more ‘toyetic’. Toy companies were brought on board to scour the script for plastic potential. They were even given the reigns to design Mr Freeze’s gun.
Almost all the key creatives involved have since apologised for Batman & Robin, but truthfully its failure isn’t really their fault. In a story as old as the industry, the film was born, built and died as toy commercial – a blatant money-printing exercise ordered by studio execs.
In 2024, the same culture of art for money’s sake produces an entirely different film. Where Batman & Robin was made to sell toys to kids, Deadpool & Wolverine’s 15-rating won’t even let kids see it. Where Schumacher’s film uses its $125m budget to build brightly coloured sets lit with luminescent gels, Disney splashes the cash by refusing to build anything practical at all. Where Batman & Robin makes money by introducing new characters and gadgets, the modern blockbuster boosts its box office by reviving the old. The intervening years have changed what it means to make a spandex-stuffed cash grab so completely that it’s easy to see the older example of the form through rose-tinted glasses.
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Because whatever you say about Batman & Robin, you can’t really call it boring. Well, maybe you can – the constant quipping and flashing lights do grate a little as it approaches the two-hour mark. But its Happy Meal persona seems more entertaining now than it presumably did in 1997 because we know it’s more or less a one-off. All family blockbusters from the 90s do not look like this. It’s aged much better than, say, Thor: The Dark World because its special brand of badness isn’t one we’re bombarded with on a monthly basis. That its critical and box office calamity essentially forced a reboot of the entire superhero genre with 2000’s X-Men makes it a piece of history, too.
Despite all that, it’s worth pointing out that Batman & Robin really is still as bad as you remember. After the novelty of watching Mr Freeze’s hockey-playing goons wears off, it might even be less entertaining. But the nature of nostalgia means it’s a much more pleasant experience to watch where we were going wrong before, rather than where we’re still going wrong now. I definitely enjoyed it more than Deadpool & Wolverine. I look forward to the comments.
