Michael Keaton Explains Why He Had To Walk Away From BATMAN FOREVER After Talks With Director Joel Schumacher

Michael Keaton Explains Why He Had To Walk Away From BATMAN FOREVER After Talks With Director Joel Schumacher

The Flash star Michael Keaton has opened up on why his meetings with filmmaker Joel Schumacher helped him realise he wouldn't be a good fit to play Bruce Wayne in Batman Forever. Read on for details...

By JoshWilding - Jan 03, 2022 03:01 PM EST
Filed Under: Batman Forever (1995)
Source: Backstage

For many DC fans, Michael Keaton remains the best big screen Batman. He played the Dark Knight in Tim Burton's Batman and Batman Returns, but didn't return for Batman Forever, a campy effort from the late Joel Schumacher that took the franchise in a more commercially friendly direction. 

All those toys were based on the likeness of Val Kilmer rather than Keaton, of course, and the actor has now opened up on what led to him walking away from a role he's since become synonymous with.

Explaining on the Backstage podcast (via The Playlist) that it "was always Bruce Wayne [and] never Batman" that attracted him to those early movies, Keaton went on to recall why he couldn't swap an exploration of what made the billionaire dress up as a bat every night for a campy, breezy adventure. "[With] the director who directed the third one, I said, ‘I just can’t do it,'" he says. "And one of the reasons I couldn’t do it was—and you know, he’s a nice enough man, he’s passed away, so I wouldn’t speak ill of him even if he were alive—he, at one point, after more than a couple of meetings where I kept trying to rationalize doing it and hopefully talking him into saying I think we don’t want to go in this direction, I think we should go in this direction. And he wasn’t going to budge."

"But I remember one of the things that I walked away going, ‘Oh boy, I can’t do this.’ He asked me, ‘I don’t understand why everything has to be so dark and everything so sad,’ and I went, ‘Wait a minute, do you know how this guy got to be Batman? Have you read...I mean, it’s pretty simple.'"

Batman Forever didn't receive the same level of acclaim as its predecessors despite memorable performances from Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey. Batman and Robin, meanwhile, was a disaster that killed the franchise until Christopher Nolan stepped in for a reboot with 2005's Batman Begins.

Now, Keaton is preparing to reprise the role of Bruce Wayne in The Flash and will then make the leap to Batgirl to serve as Barbara Gordon's mentor in a rebooted version of Gotham City. How much those movies will give him the opportunity to explore the Caped Crusader is hard to say, but it definitely sounds like there are plans for his Batman to become a key part of the main DCEU moving forward.

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pyramosteu
pyramosteu - 1/3/2022, 3:13 PM
What a great decisionba
valmic
valmic - 1/3/2022, 3:13 PM
Batman Forever have the potential to be a great Batman movie. you can see its in there. Some of the more serious stuff.
Feralwookiee
Feralwookiee - 1/3/2022, 3:18 PM
While Batman Forever is not a total trainwreck like B&R, it's still a pretty bad movie overall. That said, at least it gave us prime Kidman. 😍
Kadara
Kadara - 1/3/2022, 3:24 PM
@Feralwookiee - Eyes Wide Shut gave us a prime Kidman 🐱
Darkknight2149
Darkknight2149 - 1/3/2022, 3:50 PM
@Feralwookiee -
What he did to Two-Face (tragic character) and Riddler (Batman's Moriarty) was disrespectful, and seeing Tommy Lee Jones after Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight is super-jarring. Batman & Robin took the problems in Batman Forever and made them even worse.
MosquitoFarmer
MosquitoFarmer - 1/3/2022, 4:06 PM
@Kadara - I love that film, and she's fantastic in it, but her character was often meant to come across as less sexy by comparison in a number of her scenes. So I gotta go with @Feralwookiee on that one.
Asterisk
Asterisk - 1/3/2022, 4:11 PM
@Kadara - that movie made me feel [frick]ing weird for a week.
Kadara
Kadara - 1/3/2022, 4:25 PM
@Asterisk - You know for me,maybe I was too young and I don't get it. But years later, when Weinstein and Epstein, and all these powerful people were exposed, I had to think back of this movie and then I got weirded out. Because it turned out a lot of things I dismissed as fantasy were actually happening and that was a bit scary.
The1st
The1st - 1/3/2022, 4:41 PM
@Kadara - That gave us a primed Kidman
Feralwookiee
Feralwookiee - 1/3/2022, 4:42 PM
@Darkknight2149 - Agreed. Tlj's Two Face is horrible. Carrey is just regular annoying unfunny Carrey, but Tommy Lee Jones should've know better.
Feralwookiee
Feralwookiee - 1/3/2022, 4:43 PM
@Kadara - True. Great ass shot in that one!
Kadara
Kadara - 1/3/2022, 5:04 PM
@The1st - LMAO!!
LSHF
LSHF - 1/4/2022, 12:21 AM
@Kadara - Not that this relates directing to the point you made, but when I was growing up in the '70's, the "casting couch" was a well-known concept that early Hollywood used a great deal of the time. Since then, I have never had any reasons(s) to believe it stopped being a "thing".

These guys are just recently getting exposed to enough people that actually give a f#ck about it and can do something. Decades ago, the "metoo" movement would have gained no traction.

Exposure-wise, they have a loooooooooooooooong way to go to stop all of them. I mean, even people in power in normal jobs that people we know that work them, are pressuring people for sex for money (employment).
Repian
Repian - 1/3/2022, 3:21 PM
A third Batman movie directed by Burton and Keaton as Bruce would have been great.

I recommend the comic Batman 89. It has very interesting elements.
GhostDog
GhostDog - 1/3/2022, 3:21 PM
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