Michael Keaton’s ‘Batman Returns’ Suit Sold at Auction for $41,250
Michael Keaton hung up his DC Comics cape and cowl after 1992’s Batman Returns, handing over his superhero duties to a long line of subsequent Dark Knights, including Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale, and Ben Affleck. While each of them got an upgraded costume (in Clooney’s case, complete with Bat nipples!), Keaton’s Batsuit remains the big-screen original — which is why it has now fetched a pretty price at auction.
As first reported by EW.com, the outfit worn by Keaton in Batman Returns was sold yesterday via Nate D. Sanders Auctions in Los Angeles, with the winning (undisclosed) bidder nabbing the prized piece of memorabilia for $41,250. That’s a considerable amount of money for the item in question, given that Keaton himself was barely able to move in the costume during filming of Tim Burton’s two Batman installments. Thanks to a rubber design that made turning his head exceedingly difficult during the original Batman, Keaton (as he recounted at a RoboCop press conference in 2014, via CBR.com) was forced to reimagine his Caped Crusader:
“I’m very claustrophobic, and we didn’t even know that the suit was going to work at all until literally, like, I think hours before we were about to start shooting the suit. … So when we got in [the suit], I went, ‘Oh, I’m in trouble. Because you couldn’t get out of it; the second one, you could kind of get out of, but this thing was wrapped [around me], and it didn’t totally work. … This whole thing [where I moved my whole body like a statue] came out of — I mean, I’ll take some credit for it, but really, it was practical!”
Related: Ben Affleck’s Batman Suit Is a Stiff Throwback
Keaton’s inability to move his head forced him to rotate his entire body whenever he wanted to change direction. The heroic-looking “Bat-Turn” was lionized a few years ago in an amusing supercut that shows off just how little mobility the suit had:
Early reports suggested that Affleck’s Batman v. Superman suit would be similarly hampered by flexibility issues. However, the actor’s turn in Zack Snyder’s 2016 blockbuster was infinitely more active than Keaton’s in his Burton collaborations. Nonetheless, there’s something charmingly old-school about Keaton’s costume, which is no doubt why it netted such a price on the auction block. Still, that sum is not nearly equal to that fetched by Bale’s duds from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Returns, which went for an astounding $250,000 last year via the U.K.’s The Prop Store. (The house also sold Bale’s Batpod for over $400,000 and Tom Hardy’s Bane costume for just under $100,000.)
Which just goes to show — there’s no business like Bat-business?
Watch the suit in action in the Batman Returns trailer:
