Tim Burton wonders why everyone thinks he’s weird when he’s not the one who put nipples on Batman
The Batman Returns director has shared his take on the Batsuit's nipples in later movies
It’s easy to forget these days, where superhero movies treat their source material as sacred texts that are Special and Cool, allowing everyone who likes them to feel Special and Cool as well, but there was a time when superhero movies were regarded as weird and silly, and the only way to make them palatable to audiences was to lean into that. That’s why, at least with the benefit of hindsight, Tim Burton’s Batman from 1989 and Batman Returns from 1992 are so good. They take the concept seriously while embracing the strangeness of it, but without making the strangeness the whole point.
The fatal flaw with the subsequent Joel Schumacher films, then, was arguably that he went too far into the strange stuff, making it all bigger and more cartoonish and nipplier (as in they had more nipples). In a new interview with Empire, Tim Burton himself is basically making that argument now, saying that people had problems with his Batman movies—Returns is pretty weird, let’s all be clear on that—but that the two after his were so much weirder.
Burton suggests that the studio wasn’t thrilled with his weird darkness, which is why Schumacher was brought in for Batman Forever and then Batman & Robin, with him offering up this summation of his reaction at the time: “You complain about me, I’m too weird, I’m too dark,” he says, “and you put nipples on the costume? Go fuck yourself.”
That “go fuck yourself” seems like it’s all in good fun in context, with Burton going on to say in the Empire interview that Batman Returns in particular still sticks with him because, like the movie, he’s not “just overly dark.” It represents the “weird experiment” of reflecting the “mixture” of his worldview.
Variety has some more information about the nipples on the Val Kilmer and George Clooney Batsuits, saying Schumacher was a big fan of them and that they were intended to look like the fake molded muscles you’d see on a Roman Centurion’s armor. Hey, that kind of makes sense! It doesn’t really explain Schumacher’s fondness for dotting the Gotham skyline with statues that are 2,000 feet tall, or everything about Mr. Freeze, or everything about The Riddler. Look, they’re weird movies, and Burton is right: Nobody has any right to think of Batman Returns as a weird movie anymore. If anything, we should only think of it as a movie with zero nipples. Nobody in the movie has nipples, especially not Danny DeVito’s Penguin (now you’re picturing it, but stop).