That sort of talk leads to:
<*deep announcer voice*>
This summer, Jean Claude Van damme.....
......is.......
......Wolverine
"How you iz doin', boob ?"
WI: Superhero Film Boom in the 90s
- Thread starter Emperor Norton I
- Start date
That sort of talk leads to:
<*deep announcer voice*>
This summer, Jean Claude Van damme.....
......is.......
......Wolverine
"How you iz doin', boob ?"
I would soooooooooooooo buy that VHS. It'd be shit, but glorious 90s shit.
the difference would be that the producers would *expect* you to laugh at those iteration of wolverine. With the muscles from brussels, it might look good on paper but the ensuing humour might come as a bit of a shock to the producers.
try tracking it down, but the cover should be warning enough.......
The misguided comedy reimagining? 1990s, noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Really? This was the same sort of guys who actually did cast Ryan "Van Wilder" Reynolds as Hal Jordan, and sincerely believed the result would have been the next Star Wars.
yourworstnightmare
Banned
Actually Michael Keaton is the best Batman. But Batman Return is just a plain weird movie, still better than the Schumacher crap. But yes, someone should have stopped Burton, since Burton's love for total weirdness is usually just too much.
It's not so much weird as it is just Burton. It's all bleak and dark and stylized. And all of that is at the expense of the canon. Keep in mind, that canon is no longer *Biff* *Pow* in the late 80s and early 90s. It's "The Killing Joke" and "Dark Knight Returns" and Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams and a mature Batman that's been mature since the late 60s/early 70s. What he did was things like taking the Penguin from this high society gang leader and crime boss who looked like a Penguin and turned him into an Orphan abandoned by his family and raised by Penguins who was disgusting and perverted and sick and spit up bile, and he had Cat Woman become some chick magically turned into a super cat lady by dying or something, and he had Batman just straight up killing people and so on. Burton's Batman, very especially and perhaps mostly in Batman Returns, is more a reimagining of the character in a gothic reboot type thing than necessarily something reflective of the character and universe from the comics. It's still interesting and artistic in it's own right, but it's much deviated from Batman of lore.
The reason it was that is for one, the deviations already in Batman from 1989 (Batman murdering people, for example), but for two, the studio begged Burton to make Batman Returns and to get him on board after he said he felt he had said all he wanted to with Batman, they said he didn't have to make a Batman movie so much as a Tim Burton movie, and he went ahead and did a Tim Burton movie. That was subsequently too dark for the general public, scared the kids away and their parents (it didn't need to be light and dumbed down as much as something like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 and 3, but it was way too dark to the point where Roger Ebert called the PG-13 rating a joke), and made the studio totally rethink, and by Batman 3 when Burton was getting ready to make it himself, the studio asked if he really wouldn't rather do something else, giving him the hint they didn't want him to do Batman 3. From there, Schumacher got it, mentally moronofied it, and the rest is history.
I myself like Burton's Batman, and it is my Batman, it is the Batman that colored all Batman culture, and it's the Batman I was raised with. And I like Batman Returns for that reason, but I do understand the issues with it.
Would it help if the Superman films didn't take a massive, massive drop off with III (1983) and IV (1987)?
Oddly, the idea I had to bump this thread is this exact same idea the thread left off on, which I did not remember and now I see by going back to this thread.
I do think Superman III and IV not being terrible would indeed help. And it seems odd too that there were good possibilities for either which were totally ignored for things not so good. Superman III had a supercomputer, if I'm not mistaken; not hard to have that be Brainiac, and I think that was one of the original ideas if I'm not mistaken. Superman IV had Solar Man. Why not just have Bizarro?
Some other things that would help would be Richard Donner not being fired and being kept on for Superman II (fully) and being on board for III and IV, or at least passing the torch for director onto someone better than Dick Lester. Lester was a perfectly fine director, but he shoved comedic slapstick where it didn't belong and did not do well at all with the Superman franchise on the whole.
Superman V getting made in the 1980s or early 90s, and being good after two bad sequels, would also have helped. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I do believe there was discussion of making that film in the 80s, and having it be a return to the seriousness and quality of Superman I and II. I also believe Braniac was thought of as a possibility for a villain. Of course, the project never got made and Christopher Reeve was paralyzed forever ending it. The ideas for rebooting the Superman film franchise thereafter was an entirely new take, which came in the mid-to-late 90s and involved Braniac, Barbara Streisand's hair dresser as the producer, Nic Cage as Superman, Tim Burton as director, Kevin Smith as screenwriter (later replaced by Burton's screenwriters) and a plot based on the "Death of Superman" arc from the comics. That film was rumored and we all thought it was going to get made, but it never happened either.
EDIT: I found details on the Superman 5 with Chris Reeve that could have been.
http://www.reelz.com/movie-news/6990/what-could-have-been-part-2-superman-5/
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I just realized, no one mentioned the Catwoman film. It was originally intended to be a direct and soon to follow spin off of Batman Returns but lingered in development hell. It eventually got made as that godawful Halle Berry film over a decade later which had nothing to do with Batman or the actual Catwoman, let alone Batman Returns.
The original concept would have involved Michelle Pfeiffer reprising her role (the reason for no Catwoman in Batman Forever). Burton would direct, with Denise Di Novi producing and the writer of Batman Returns, Daniel Waters, writing the script. The issue with the script appears to be that while Batman Forever was taking the franchise into family friendly territory, the Catwoman film would have remained true to the Tim Burton grit; a grit they had kept Burton off of the third Batman film over, because they didn't want things too dark given the parental backlash. They turned in the script the same day Batman Forever was released.
A 90s Catwoman film would be something to contribute to an era boom. It could linger in development hell until some point in the 90s, it could end up not being very good. Anything would have been better than the Halle Berry film. Given the character (a girl who is not Batman), it may also not end up being too much of a financial success.
The original concept would have involved Michelle Pfeiffer reprising her role (the reason for no Catwoman in Batman Forever). Burton would direct, with Denise Di Novi producing and the writer of Batman Returns, Daniel Waters, writing the script. The issue with the script appears to be that while Batman Forever was taking the franchise into family friendly territory, the Catwoman film would have remained true to the Tim Burton grit; a grit they had kept Burton off of the third Batman film over, because they didn't want things too dark given the parental backlash. They turned in the script the same day Batman Forever was released.
A 90s Catwoman film would be something to contribute to an era boom. It could linger in development hell until some point in the 90s, it could end up not being very good. Anything would have been better than the Halle Berry film. Given the character (a girl who is not Batman), it may also not end up being too much of a financial success.
I think a good possible route is for a more realistic turn to happen earlier. The problem with the Burton turn is the campiness of it all.
Campy eventually leads down that road to childness without correct artistic direction, which they lost when they sacked Burton.
The only way to really counteract this is by a more realistic strain of films also proving successful.
Still, it is not like there were no comic book films in the '90s....
Campy eventually leads down that road to childness without correct artistic direction, which they lost when they sacked Burton.
The only way to really counteract this is by a more realistic strain of films also proving successful.
Still, it is not like there were no comic book films in the '90s....
yourworstnightmare
Banned
I think the problem with the 80s and 90s is that the canon in the comic books have suddenly become serious, but for the general public the mentality is still that comic books are cheesy costumes and one- liners and not much else. The studios, writers and directors will also consider them as that, and thus do "moronified" things like the Schumacher Batman films and ignore the canon completely like Burton did in Batman Return. This in turn will probably give us movies that will be successful at first, as the general public like the gimmicks, explosions and cheesy dialogue, but the fans of the comic books will turn away from it, and very soon the super hero boom would just die, with every movie being pretty much the same, the general public would just be bored and stop going to see them.
Batman in 1989 did away with the cheesy, *biff* *pow* quality in the public mentality, at least where it concerns superheroes in film, and showed that comics could be serious and these were serious characters. Superman in 1978 also did away with it, and doesn't seem to get enough credit compared to Batman in that respect (Batman had to overcome the show).
What happened with the "moron" factor in the Batman films was not because the public was expecting *biff* *pow*; they already had that cherry popped. It was a natural thing of Hollywood trying to adapt to the audience. Batman Returns was too dark, so they lightened the franchise up. Kids love superheroes and parents groups were losing their minds that Batman Returns was as dark as it was and yet they were still selling toys and Happy Meals to kids based on that movie. That's why Batman Forever was made the way it was: it was made to be a more family friendly Batman. It wasn't campy. The camp came with Batman & Robin, which is totally camp. That camp came from the trend being going lighter and family friendly, a category of which camp falls in, rather than the trend itself being camp.
Then it came down that "This is too silly. Get serious." and we got the modern era of superhero films we have which started with X-Men and Spiderman, and continues up to this very day. To paraphrase Patton Oswalt, if I'm not confusing the quote of someone else, superhero movies took hitting that shit wall with the Batman franchise and that franchise failing in order to realize "we have to get to task and take this seriously" and that lead to X-Men and all of this that followed.
Don't get me wrong, a bad studio executive or director or writer or producer can still think of comics as campy like old comic books, and you can see bad films as a result of them doing them with that as the concept. I'm just saying Batman made it so that that was not guaranteed, and so that it would be their fault rather than the result of everyone thinking of comics that way.
Those bad people are the reason Batman & Robin was what it was. Those people are the reason Superman 3 and 4 were what they were, although that's actually the result of Richard Lester being a comedy director and going for slapstick and gags than him going for comic book camp.
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Actually, something I've always wondered about is if a Justice League International movie had been made in the 90s. It seems like the most likely iteration of the JLA to be made, then or now, and Sam Neill would make an AWESOME Maxwell Lord--at a stretch, Steve Martin could work as a more overtly comedic version too. Don't know who I'd cast for the actual heroes, though.
That was the failed TV pilot. It didn't have Superman or Batman nor Wonder Woman, only had, of the big names, Flash, Martian Manhunter and Green Lantern, and the rest were filled out with the "who cares" superheroes. And the costumes were 1990s TV budget and production quality, meaning they were ridiculous and terrible, and more like regional theme park character suits than "make me feel like this is real" costumes.
Ah yes, I remember the JLA pilot. If it hadn't played itself up as a Friends ripoff--and if it had been a movie with a good budget--it might have had a chance...