How old were you when Tim Burton’s Batman came out in theaters in 1989? Ten? Two? A half-formed idea in the back of your parents’ minds? I was five, and therefore the impact the film had on Hollywood was somewhat lost on me growing up. But even at that young age, I still remember its ubiquity, the sense that it was somehow profound, and that if I didn’t see it my place in the world would be less valid.

Batman was doing something right for it to achieve that kind of heated fervor in the mind of a (admittedly weirdly intense) child, and indeed the film did so many things right that Hollywood has never, for better or worse, been the same since.

Hee hee heee HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

New Bat, New Joker

To fully understand how Batman shook up the status quo, it’s best to start at the beginning. When Tim Burton landed the gig to direct the movie in the late ’80s, Batman’s comic book iterations had long since shaken off the campy sensibilities that defined him during the ‘60s. This was the decade of Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns; psychological complexity was in, sky-blue spandex was out.

Warner Bros. received 50,000 complaint letters over Keaton's casting.

So if a Batman movie was going to be made, the fans cried, they better not be reminded of Adam "To the Batcave!" West. The execs at Warner Bros., who had been keeping the project alive against great odds for around a decade, agreed.Burton, who had proved a deft hand at turning out family-friendly fare with a dark edge on a small budget, made sense to the studio. But fans weren’t on board. Burton only had two major movies to his name, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, which didn’t exactly scream ‘gritty.’ To worsen the niggling unease that Warner had picked the “wrong” director, came the announcement that Burton had cast entirely the “wrong” actor in the role of the Dark Knight.

Michael Keaton was a comedy actor, of course. He wasn’t Batman, he was Beetlejuice. He was Mr. freakin’ Mom. Fans were livid. This was exactly what they didn’t want; a return to the BAM, POW! self-parodying Batman of the ‘60s. 50,000 of them wrote in to the studio to express their distaste, baying for Keaton to be replaced by any number of the square-jawed movie royalty of the era.

Jack Nicholson chewing scenery.

Batmania

Burton felt the pressure, but he did not budge. He knew that Keaton could bring a humanity to this sort of role that more obvious leading men cast on looks and youth couldn’t. He was committed to doing something very unusual for a big-budgeted genre movie back in the ‘80s: casting against type.“I wanted to take the comic book material and make it real,” he told the New York Times .“That’s the great thing about these characters; they’re not superheroes like Superman. They’re real people. And this new generation of comic books really explores the psychology and complexities of the characters. It’s not just how square the guy’s jaw is.”“The image of Batman is a big male model type,” agreed Producer Jon Peters. “But I wanted a guy who’s a real person who happens to put on this weird armor. A guy who’s funny and scary. Keaton’s both. He’s got that explosive, insane side.”Burton had another card up his sleeve. He knew that Keaton didn’t have to carry the movie by himself. Drawing from Miller and Moore, he wanted to depict Joker and Batman as two sides of the same coin, placing each as the psychological mirror image of the other.The idea of a villain as more than just a roughly-sketched plot-device had cooled somewhat in ‘80s Hollywood (in Scott Mendleson’s piece How Batman Changed the Movie Business , he argues Goldfinger was the last high concept film with an interesting antagonist), so Burton’s idea to place his villain front and centre felt vital and new. His Joker, played by the irrepressible Jack Nicholson, would be an anarchistic, gleeful and totally homicidal maniac whose bloody theatrics were committed ‘just because.’Bruce Wayne, on the other hand, would possess a different kind of insanity; one that would compel him to dress in a giant rubber suit and chase criminals in the night. The hero turned neurotic and the villain thrust into the limelight, they would perform a twisted double act.Nobody would have seen anything like it before.

The suspicion that Warner Bros. had made a big mistake by bringing Burton on board didn’t last long. Knowing the film had a lot to prove, Warner Bros. rushed to put together a teaser trailer to highlight the menacing tone of the film. Essentially a series of quick cuts between disparate and mostly violent vignettes, the teaser was sinister and eerily scoreless; due, in all likelihood, to the speed at which it was thrown together. When the Joker looks up from his newspaper and mutters “wait’ll they getta load of me,” nay-sayers were convinced. This was finally it, they agreed. The Batman we deserve.

Thus began a cultural phenomenon colloquially coined ‘Batmania,’ fuelled by a blanket rabid desire to consume absolutely everything to do with the film and Warners’ aggressive marketing strategy, which pitched Batman squarely as a Must-See Cinematic Event.

“That summer was huge,” remembers filmmaker Kevin Smith. “You couldn't turn around without seeing the Bat-Signal somewhere. People were cutting it into their f**king heads. It was just the summer of Batman and if you were a comic book fan it was pretty hot.”

So many pretty toys.

“In 1989, the massive media blitz accompanying the release of Tim Burton's 'Batman' reached the fevered pitch of the media's later hyper-attention to such dark events in America's history as the Gulf War, the Hill-Thomas hearings, and the Los Angeles riots,” wrote critic Emanuel Levy in his 2005 piece How Tim Burton Changed the Comic Hero. “The media's passionate love affair with 'Batman' was predictable, given the film's compelling and unusually dark aesthetics, which played off of the late 1980s blues.”Warner Bros. also played off of late 1980s consumerism. Merchandising for the film reached unprecedented extremes, to the point where Batman cereal reigned on the supermarket shelf and one could purchase a presumably hideous, albeit officially-licensed, $500 jacket with the Bat logo studded in rhinestones. An estimation in 1992 said that over $500 million worth of official Batman merchandise had been sold, not including the bootleg merchandise folk were purchasing (with what one can only imagine to be a Jingle All the Way fervor) on street corners. In 1989 middle America, the black and gold Batman logo was as omnipresent as religious iconography.It was an anomaly for a non-sequel to be surrounded by such intense attention before or during the early days of its theatrical run. While E.T. and Star Wars also enjoyed branding on boxes of puffed wheat, much of their merchandising came well after release. In Batman’s case, it was inherently tied into the hype. The film’s eventual success ensured that nowadays, comic book movies and merchandising enjoy a symbiotic relationship that hadn’t existed pre-1989, and ‘cinematic events’ are a dime a dozen.