Hi, you must be new here. I'd like to direct your attention to the Dark Knight Trilogy, which has dominated the box office for the past decade. And all those godawful Clooney Batman movies. And the ones before that. And let's not forget that we're getting at least 3 batman movies in the next decade. Batman is already the franchise that will not die.
Ah, but you're talking about the box-office movies of RECENT times! I'm talking about late 1960s-early 1970s
television! The
1966 Batman was cool because it was
CAMP and funny,not serious, like
Star Trek. This may sound asinine to you, but I really do think we would have a different pop culture from what we know today if
Star Trek had failed after one season on NBC and
Batman had survived into the 1970-71 television season.
Did you know that originally Geoffrey Hunter was to play Captain Christopher Pike and Martin Landau was to play Mr. Spock? It was only through a last-minute decision by Gene Roddenberry that Bill Shatner had won the role of Captain James T. Kirk and Leonard Nimoy was to play Mr. Spock. One wonders if the series would have succeeded with the Hunter/Landau duo as the heroes.