The modern superhero blockbuster as we know it began with Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989. Burton also directed the first sequel, Batman Returns, in 1992, after which he and star Michael Keaton left the franchise. Burton hasn’t made any more superhero movies since, and in a new interview with Variety, the director said he doesn’t plan on returning to the genre anytime soon.
“Like I said, I look at things from different perspectives, so I never say ‘never’ to anything,” Burton told Variety, “but at this point, it’s not something I’m interested in.”
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Tim Burton supervises Michelle Pfeiffer on the set of Batman Returns.
Courtesy of Warner Bros./Everett Collection
Burton, clearly not shying away from looking back at his older work in general, is currently promoting Beetlejuice, his long-in-development sequel to Burton’s original horror-comedy classic, which was released a year before Batman and starred Keaton in the lead role.
Sam Raimi, whose early 2000s Spider-Man films with Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst also pioneered the modern superhero blockbuster, recently returned to the genre with 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but for now, at least, Burton has no intention of doing anything similar.
The director noted that the environment in which he made Batman was very different from the current studio environment for superhero movies. The biggest DC superhero movie before Batman was 1978’s Superman, but Burton replaced that film’s melancholy Americana with violent crime fighting set against a gothic aesthetic inspired by German Expressionism, an influence that permeates many of his other films. With studios increasingly concerned with maintaining brand consistency, such unique artistic expression is much harder to achieve in a franchise film these days.
“I was lucky because the word ‘franchise’ didn’t exist back then,” Burton says, “so Batman felt a bit experimental at the time. [of a superhero movie] Probably. So we didn’t hear any feedback from the studio, and being in the UK, it was even more distant. We were really just focusing on the movie and not thinking too much about the pre-shooting stuff that they’re thinking about now.”
Read the full interview with Burton at Variety.