‘The duel of the freaks’: What today’s superhero movies could learn from Tim Burton’s Batman

Ahead of Robert Pattinson’s Batman swooping onto screens, Geoffrey Macnab looks back at director Tim Burton’s quirky, auteurist approach to Gotham

Flawed human or superhero? Michael Keaton with Kim Basinger in Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ (Warner Bros/Dc Comics/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Picture the torpor and distress at Pinewood Studios in the late 1980s, a period when the UK film industry was in the doldrums. The strength of the pound meant that the Hollywood majors were extremely reluctant to shoot on this side of the Atlantic. There were no tax breaks to entice them. The most recent James Bond film, License to Kill (1989), had committed sacrilege by doing most of its filming not at Pinewood but in faraway Mexico. Just when despair was setting in, Tim Burton came galloping to the rescue, bringing his film version of Batman to leafy Buckinghamshire. It was at Pinewood Studios that the director and the Warner Bros bosses decided to recreate Gotham City in all its sleaze, corruption and violence.

With the Robert Pattinson-fronted The Batman shortly to reach cinemas, it’s a timely moment to look back three decades to Burton’s first Batman movie starring Michael Keaton as the caped crusader and Jack Nicholson as the Joker. In hindsight, it appears one of the most influential films of its era – and is still the oddest, most original Batman movie ever made. The Marvel and DC screen adaptations that have dominated global box office in recent years owe it a huge debt.

After the kitsch, tongue-in-cheek approach of the Christopher Reeve Superman films of the Seventies and early Eighties, Burton allowed some much-needed darkness to seep back into screen adaptations of comic books. His Batman also proved that, for any self-respecting Hollywood studio looking to make a big budget franchise movie, the UK was the place to come.