How one of the worst movies ever created a Hollywood gold mine
(Credits: Far Out/Warner Bros.)
It may seem contradictory to suggest that one of the worst films ever made served as the catalyst for the industry’s biggest goldmine, but that’s exactly what happened when the dominoes started falling in the wake of a disaster. Batman and Robin.
Eight years after Tim Burton Batman It became an era-defining blockbuster and revolutionized the industry far beyond the confines of the screen. With Jack Nicholson’s game-changing lucrative contract and the commercial fortune it generated, Joel Schumacher commanded a stake in the heart of the franchise.
George Clooney appears to be designed for the express purpose of selling as many toys as possible, and he’s publicly smashed them Batman and Robin For more than a quarter century, Schumacher has even issued an apology to fans for dragging “The Dark Knight” into a lurid world of rubber nipples, outrageous pranks, and neon-lit nonsense.
In the same year that the comic book Abomination was released, Kevin Feige was working on his first feature film as an assistant to producer Loren Shuler Donner. volcanoa role he will perform again on the rom-com You’ve got mail. Of course, the lifelong superhero supporter had much bigger ideas about where his career would take him.
Sufficiently impressed by his encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel Comics, Donner promoted Feige from assistant to associate producer on Bryan Singer’s X-Men In 2000, he was then appointed as Marvel’s second-in-command to Avi Arad. However, this wasn’t enough for Feige, who dreamed of creating an entire world where the company’s superheroes could freely interact with each other.
At just 33 years old, Feige was named President of Production at Marvel Studios in March 2007, making for a major blueprint that couldn’t have gotten off to a better start when Iron Man It hit theaters the following summer, spawning the highest-grossing film series of all time.
In an interview with Los Angeles Timesthe man who has undoubtedly become the most powerful producer of the modern era cannot be spoken highly enough of Batman and Robin. “This may be the most important comedy ever made,” he said. “It was so bad that it required a new way of doing things. I created the opportunity to do it X-Men And Spider ManEdits that respect the source material and edits that are not campy.
If it wasn’t for Batman and Robin Being so irredeemably terrible, comic book movies could hypothetically continue in the same comic vein. After he put his foot in the door of the industry that very year before participating in it X-MenSam Raimi Spider ManBen Affleck reckless et al., the knock-on effect creates the very real possibility that the Marvel Cinematic Universe might never have existed in its current form if not for Clooney’s ill-fated stint under the cape and cowl.
Of course, superhero cinema existed before the MCU, but tying multiple characters together in a shared mythology changed the paradigm entirely. These days, every major studio and production company wants their own version of what Feige created for better or worse, and with comic books remaining Hollywood’s most popular means of generating maximum revenue, Batman and RobinThe reputation of “cinema” has now developed to the point that all of blockbuster cinema would look irrevocably different—and less profitable—without it.
