Where to watch Batman (1989)

Trivia & production notes

• Tim Burton initially avoided comic books due to difficulty reading the panel layout, but The Killing Joke was the first comic he ever loved and helped convince him the darker Batman vision was viable for film.
• Batman's film rights were purchased in 1979 when the character's popularity was declining and CBS wanted to make a Batman in Outer Space movie.
• Multiple major studios including Columbia Pictures and United Artists rejected Batman because producers wanted it to resemble the campy 1960s TV series rather than the dark version Michael Uslan envisioned.
• Ivan Reitman was briefly attached to direct and proposed casting Bill Murray as Batman and Eddie Murphy as Robin.
• The screenplay went through nine separate rewrites by nine different writers before Sam Hamm's final version was completed in October 1986.
• When Michael Keaton's casting was announced, Warner Bros. received 50,000 protest letters from comic book fans who feared the film would be campy like the 1960s TV series.
• John Lithgow attempted to convince Tim Burton not to cast him as the Joker during his audition, a decision he later publicly regretted.
• Ray Liotta declined a scheduled meeting with Burton for the Joker role because he thought the film would be stupid, and he later expressed regret about the decision.
• Robin Williams lobbied hard for the Joker role, but Jack Nicholson was the studio's top choice since 1980.
• Bill Finger, Batman's co-creator, remained uncredited when the film was released and his name was not added to Batman-related media until 2016.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Batman (1989 film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.