A planned free of charge screening of Batman Forever: The Schumacher Cut has been cancelled, after Warner Bros sent a legal letter.
The late Joel Schumacher scored one of his biggest box office successes with 1995’s Batman Forever, a film that rebooted the antics of the Dark Knight on the big screen and, well, made him lighter. Starring the late Val Kilmer in the Batsuit, with a not-getting-along Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones doing battle with, I can’t pretend it’s a film I’m a big fan of. But still, Schumacher was long believed to have a darker, longer cut of the film, and he’d talked about that prior to his death.
In much the same way as Richard Donner’s version of Superman II then became an internet thing, so has Batman Forever: The Schumacher Cut. Kevin Smith posted that he’d seen a longer, darker version of the 1995 movie, and this only added to the clamour for it. The cut that Smith saw still, reportedly, needed a fair amount of work, and having been burned by the Snyder Cut of Justice League, Warner Bros Discovery hasn’t seemed too inclined to fork out around $10m to get the movie finished.
What is has been inclined to do is get its lawyers to do some work.
A store called Cinefile Video, based in California, had earned headlines a week or two back when it declared that it had a copy of the ‘the Schumacher cut’, and was intending to screen it. It wasn’t charging for the screening, and was an event planned for its members.
We’re not having that, said the Warner Bros legal team, and a cease and desist letter has promptly been fired in the direction of Cinefile Video.
“Our planned screening of Batman Forever has been cancelled”, it’s announced.
“This follows a legal request from Warner Bros. regarding the rights to the version of the film we intended to show. While this was a free, members-only event meant to celebrate a unique piece of film history, we respect the rights of studios and creators, and have chosen to withdraw the event accordingly.”
Warner Bros did in the end back Richard Donner’s version of Superman II, overseeing its restoration and releasing it. No so plans are known for Batman Forever: The Schumacher Cut, but further cease and desist letters are presumably available for anyone else who wants to put on a not-for-profit free screening.
