How Tim Burton's 'Batman' Changed the Way Summer Movies Are Sold

There were plenty of headline-grabbing, billboard-clogging movies back in the summer of 1989: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; Ghostbusters II; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. But there was only one blockbuster so immense, it had its own breakfast cereal. And no, it wasn’t Weekend at Bernie’s.

To a degree that’s hard to grasp if you weren’t there, the summer of ’89 was the summer of Tim Burton’s Batman. Superhero movies are now a summer-movie staple, but back in 1989, most people still thought of comic books as kids’ stuff, and Batman in particular was seen as a campy castaway from the ’60s. Yet by the time Burton’s film arrived, the whole country had gone Bats---. As Kevin Smith would later note, “You couldn’t turn around [that summer] without seeing the Bat-Signal somewhere. People were cutting it into their f----ing heads.”

The result was a $400 million blockbuster that spawned a seven-film franchise, ushered in the modern era of comic-book movies, and rewrote the playbook for how studios market tentpole movies. And it was due, in no small part, to a series of risky choices undertaken not only by Burton, but also by the executives tasked with making Batman a smash. “There were no breadcrumbs to find exactly what the path was,” remembers Peter Guber, who produced the movie along with his then-partner Jon Peters. “We had to actually invent it as we were going along.” Twenty-five years later, with Hollywood rolling out yet another superhero-packed summer, the aftershocks of Batman are still being felt. Here are five lessons the movie taught Hollywood about how summer movies are sold.

1. Don’t Be Afraid to Go Dark

Before Batman came along, the last successful superhero franchise was Christopher Reeve’s Superman series, which had succumbed to box-office kryptonite after a series of increasingly cornball sequels. Not surprisingly, Batman stayed stuck in development at Warner Bros. for nearly a decade before the studio finally gave it the green light. “It was an expensive picture, and there were a lot of misgivings about it,” Guber says. “There were synopses from the studio saying, ‘This is juvenile. We shouldn’t be making comic-book pictures.’ Everybody was holding their breath.”     

But unlike the Superman films, Batman was far from kiddie stuff. Inspired by Frank Miller’s acclaimed dystopian 1986 comic series, The Dark Knight Returns, the creative team behind Batman — which included Burton and screenwriters Warren Skaaren and Sam Hamm — decided on a much darker, more gothic approach. Set in a corrupt, violent, and grimy Gotham City, the film paired its sulking vigilante hero (Michael Keaton) against the psychotic, quick-to-quip Joker (Jack Nicholson). “The young audience felt that this film was for them — that it wasn’t safe,” says Mark Canton, then the head of production at Warner Bros. “Batman proved you could go after that comic-book audience in a dark, bold way and not a ‘golly gee’ way.” Hollywood would spend the next decade trying to replicate this downbeat approach to comic-book fare, often without much success (see: Alec Baldwin’s brooding, boring 1994 flop The Shadow), before finally cracking the code with smile-free smashes like X-Men (2000) and Batman Begins (2005). Nowadays, nearly all big-screen superheroes — even the once-chipper Superman — spend as much time battling inner demons as they do fighting crime.

2. Get the Fans on Your Side

If you think Ben Affleck got a hard time from fans when he was announced as the new Batman last year, he’s got nothing on Michael Keaton. The casting of a comedic actor such as Keaton was initially seen by the comic-book faithful as a veritable catastrophe, a sign that Burton — whose directing credits at that point were limited to Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice — planned to make Batman in the goofy vein of the 1960s TV series. Batusi-phobic fans flooded Warner Bros. with 50,000 angry letters, while newspapers like the Wall Street Journal devoted front-page stories to the casting controversy. “Keaton was not at all the obvious choice,” Canton says. “He was a brilliant actor, but he was not a superhero-sized guy. People couldn’t wait to see us fail.”

The studio flew into action to head off the bad buzz. Even before a frame of film was shot, Warner Bros. brought Batman co-creator Bob Kane to its 1988 San Diego Comic-Con, where the comics legend gave the film his blessing. Months later, with shooting still underway, the studio cut together some early footage into a foreboding, music-free teaser that highlighted the film’s action and darkness, dropping it into theaters at Christmas. Soon, excited fans were buying tickets to other films, just so they could see that Batman trailer. “We felt it would show fans how different the movie was from what they were perceiving,” says Rob Friedman, who was then the head of advertising and publicity at Warner Bros. “And it worked perfectly.”

Indeed, the campaign to woo Batman fanboys was so effective, it set the precedent for every superhero-movie launch since. Releasing early tidbits to the comic-book faithful is now standard practice — witness Zack Snyder’s recent tweet of Affleck in his Batman costume — while Comic-Con is now seen as a critical first stop for anyone looking to rally the faithful.

3. Maintain A Sense of Secrecy…

Instead of launching its Batman campaign with a splashy, heroic poster showing Keaton in his bat-regalia, Warner Bros. instead went for a campaign that emphasized mystery, focusing instead on the brand-new Bat-logo. Designed by Anton Furst — who would go on to win an Oscar for the film’s production design — it took the iconic black-and-yellow symbol Batman wore in the comics and gave it a slick, dark, metallic sheen.

When Furst’s logo began appearing on posters, billboards, and buttons, most people didn’t know what to make of it. “[They] were turning it on its side, holding it upside down: Was it teeth? Was it a bat?” Friedman says. “We got a lot of mileage out of that.” Furst’s abstract creation heightened the intrigue surrounding the film, and soon, both the new design and the classic Bat-logo were being plastered on T-shirts and tchotchkes. “[The logos] became a phenomenon,” says Dan Romanelli, then the head of consumer products at Warner Bros. “I think we sold over 30 million black T-shirts with that yellow logo — and there were probably another 10 million illegal ones.”

4. …Before Sending a Bat-Signal to the World

Having beaten back the tide of bad buzz almost overnight with its sparse Christmas teaser, Warner Bros. realized that it could focus its marketing on the film’s gothic visual style, not its plot. “The marketing of Batman wasn’t driven by narrative,” Guber says. “It was driven by emotional wonder.”

The challenge, though, was making sure that sense of awe didn’t get lost amid a crowded summer slate featuring big-threat sequels such as Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and the James Bond thriller Licence to Kill. To ensure Batman broke through the clutter, the studio aired a 90-second Batman TV ad on all the major networks, almost a month before the film’s actual release.

"You basically got every eyeball that was watching television," Friedman says of the clip. "It caught everybody off-guard." That kind of carpet-bombing blitz is more difficult in today’s fragmented media landscape, of course, but as evidenced by the big-studio trailers that air during the Super Bowl, splashy TV buys are still a crucial part of selling a movie.

5. Don’t Forget to Make Some Wonderful Toys

Today’s blockbusters are routinely merchandised to the hilt, but in the 1980s, toy stores were routinely littered with unsold ephemera from movies such as Dune and E.T. With a superhero like Batman, though, who came fully equipped with a rocket-powered armored car and a host of gadgets kids could drool over, Warner Bros. realized it had a potential tie-in bonanza on its hands. “Peter Guber and Jon Peters came to see me really early to tell me what they wanted to do, and I was jumping out of my skin,” Romanelli remembers. “At the time, my [consumer products] division consisted of about two people. I thought, ‘This is going to put us on the map!’”   

It did more than that. Stores around the world were flooded with endless amounts of Bat-stuff: toys, action figures, mugs, trading cards, candy dispensers, $500 rhinestone-crusted Batman jackets, and on and on — not to mention a Prince soundtrack album that sat at No. 1 on the Billboard charts for six weeks. In the end, Batman merchandise would pull in more than $500 million, much of it earned before audiences had even seen the movie.

"I remember some people at the studio were embarrassed by the media coverage of the merchandising. They worried that it was exploitive and not cool," Romanelli says. "Back then we had to hide our success. Now they’re making movies about the products. Transformers is based on a toy.”

Looking back now, Canton is struck by how much the business of making and marketing blockbusters has changed since Batman — and how much it has changed because of Batman: “It seems like it was a different world then,” he says. “The word ‘tentpole’ was hardly even used, and we didn’t have the direct, instantaneous communication apparatus like we do now. It was like guerrilla marketing — we had to almost carry it by hand and spread the word. I don’t know how it worked, but somehow, it made history.”

Photo credit: Everett Collection; Logo credit: Warner Bros.