How one of the worst movies ever made created the industry’s most lucrative genre
It sounds oxymoronic to suggest one of the worst movies ever made served as the catalyst for the industry’s biggest goldmine, but that’s exactly what happened once the dominoes started falling in the aftermath of Batman & Robin.
Eight years after Tim Burton’s Batman had become an era-defining blockbuster that revolutionised the industry well beyond the confines of the screen through Jack Nicholson’s lucrative game-changing contract and the merchandising bonanza it generated, Joel Schumacher drove a stake right through the heart of the franchise.
Seemingly designed for the express purpose of selling as many toys as possible, George Clooney has openly trashed Batman & Robin for over a quarter of a century, while Schumacher even issued an apology to the fans for dragging the ‘Dark Knight’ down into the harrowing world of rubber nipples, terrible quips, and neon-lit nonsense.
The very same year the abominable comic book adaptation was released, Kevin Feige was working on his very first feature film as an assistant to producer Lauren Shuler Donner on Volcano, a role he’d fulfil once again on rom-com You’ve Got Mail. Of course, the lifelong superhero supporter had much bigger ideas for where his career would take him.
Sufficiently impressed by his encyclopaedic knowledge of Marvel Comics, Donner upgraded Feige from assistant to associate producer on Bryan Singer’s X-Men in 2000, which then saw him hired as Marvel chief Avi Arad’s second-in-command. However, that still wasn’t enough for Feige, who dreamed of creating an entire world where the company’s superheroes could freely interact with each other.
At the age of just 33 years old, Feige was named as Marvel Studios’ president of production in March 2007, which saw him concoct a grand masterplan that couldn’t have gotten off to a better start when Iron Man hit cinemas the following summer, giving rise to what’s far and away the highest-grossing film series of all time.
In an interview with LA Times, the man who became arguably the most powerful producer of the modern era couldn’t speak highly enough of Batman & Robin. “That may be the most important comic book movie ever made,” he said. “It was so bad that it demanded a new way of doing things. It created the opportunity to do X-Men and Spider-Man, adaptations that respected the source material and adaptations that were not campy.”
If it wasn’t for Batman & Robin being so irredeemably awful, then comic book movies could have hypothetically continued on in the same kitschy vein. Having gotten his foot in the industry door that very year before being involved with X-Men, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, Ben Affleck’s Daredevil and others, the knock-on effect creates the very real possibility that the Marvel Cinematic Universe may have never existed in its current form were it not for Clooney’s ill-fated stint under the cape and cowl.
Superhero cinema existed before the MCU, of course, but tying so many characters together into a shared mythology shifted the paradigm entirely. These days, every major studio and production company wants their own version of what Feige created for better or worse, and with comic books remaining Hollywood’s most popular means of generating maximum revenue, Batman & Robin‘s reputation has now evolved to the point where the entirety of blockbuster cinema would look irrevocably different – and much less profitable – without it.
