American actor George Clooney on the set of Batman & Robin, directed by Joel Schumacher. Photo / Getty
American actor George Clooney on the set of Batman & Robin, directed by Joel Schumacher. Photo / Getty
Twenty years after its release, Batman & Robin remains one of the most controversial films in the Batman canon, with many diehard fans turning their noses up at the campy 1997 outing.
Now, director Joel Schumacher is offering those fans an apology.
The prolific director was at the helm for two Batman films during the 90s: Batman Forever, which saw Val Kilmer as the masked crusader, and Batman & Robin, in which ER star George Clooney tried his luck as a superhero.
The former received mixed reviews, while the latter was savaged by critics and struggled at the box office.
"Look, I apologise. I want to apologise to every fan that was disappointed because I think I owe them that," he said in a new interview with Vice.
The director said that, with the benefit of hindsight, he can see he should have left the franchise after the success of 1995's Batman Forever.
"You know, I just knew not to do a sequel. If you get lucky, walk away. But everybody at Warner Brothers just expected me to do one. Maybe it was some hubris on my part. I had a batting average of 1000, so I went from falling down a bit after Lost Boys, to a kind of a genius with The Client, a big blockbuster with Batman Forever, then had great reviews with A Time to Kill, so my batting average was good.
"I never planned on being, that dreadful quote, 'a blockbuster king' because my other films were much smaller and had just found success with the audience and not often with the critics, which is really why we wrote them.
And then after Batman & Robin, I was scum. It was like I had murdered a baby," he recalled.
The film has an 11 per cent approval rating on review aggregating website Rotten Tomatoes, who summarise that it is "a frantic and mindless movie that's too jokey to care much for."
It certainly took some time for the Batman franchise to recover - it would be eight years before another big-screen instalment in the series, with 2005's Christopher Nolan-directed Batman Begins launching the Christian Bale vision of the superhero that lives on today.
Batman might have been Nolan's baby for the past 12 years, but back when Schumacher was approached to take over the franchise, he hesitated because it was so closely associated with director Tim Burton, who'd helmed Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992).
"Tim, who is a great friend of mine, begged me to take the franchise because of the pressure and he was ready to walk away. It's really interesting to me is, because if you see Tim's and my [films], you'd understand how innocent the audience was back then when it demanded to have more of a family-friendly Batman. Then when you see Christopher Nolan's trilogy, the last one especially where he's dealing with real class and economic problems, you see how the audience has changed in the fact that they can accept and want darker and darker subject matter."
Schumacher isn't the only person involved with Batman & Robin to later offer an apology for the film: Batman himself, George Clooney, later called the movie a "disaster" in an interview on The Graham Norton Show.
"I thought at the time this was going to be a very good career move. Um, it wasn't," he said.
