Tim Burton finds it comical to see the Batman movie franchise embracing its darkest tone yet in Matt Reeves’ “The Batman” when such a tone forced him out of the franchise following 1992’s “Batman Returns.” Speaking to Empire magazine, Burton revealed he has yet to see “The Batman” (he noted, “I’d like to see it”) but added, “It is funny to see this now, because all these memories come back of, ‘It’s too dark,’ So, it makes me laugh a little bit.”
Burton’s “Batman Returns” was met with some resistance by Warner Bros. because of its dark tone, which the studio did not want to continue with on a third Burton movie. The director left and was replaced by Joel Schumacher, who went in a complete opposite direction than Burton with the over-the-top camp in “Batman Forever” and “Batman & Robin.”
“[Back then] they went the other way,” Burton said. “That’s the funny thing about it. But then I was like, ‘Wait a minute. Okay. Hold on a second here. You complain about me, I’m too weird, I’m too dark, and then you put nipples on the costume? Go fuck yourself.’ Seriously. So yeah, I think that’s why I didn’t end up [doing a third film.]”
“I’m not just overly dark,” Burton added. “That represents me in the sense that…that’s how I see things. It’s not meant as pure darkness. There’s a mixture. I feel really fondly about [‘Batman Returns’] because of the weird experiment that it felt like.”
As for adding nipples to Batman’s costume, that was the brain child of Schumacher and the franchise’s lead sculptor Jose Fernandez. Speaking to Mel Magazine this month, Fernandez said the nipples worked far better in “Batman Forever” because they were less pronounced on the suit.
“It wasn’t fetish to me, it was more informed by Roman armor — like Centurions,” Fernandez said about the costume’s nipples. “And, in the comic books, the characters always looked like they were naked with spray paint on them — it was all about anatomy, and I like to push anatomy. I don’t know exactly where my head was at back in the day, but that’s what I remember. And so, I added the nipples. I had no idea there was going to end up being all this buzz about it.”
Schumacher allegedly loved the nipples so much in “Batman Forever” that he requested to showcase them even more in “Batman & Robin.” Fernandez did not want to go in that direction, but “he’s the boss, so we sharpened them, circled them and it all became kind of ridiculous.”
“I didn’t really care or think much about it,” Fernandez added about the nipple controversy. “Whenever I had a chance, I’d explain where the concept came from — from Roman armor — but after a while, it got its own life and I just let it be. I couldn’t think of it much more after that.”
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