Why?
Just why?
Holy guacamole, Batman! Why?!
In a world... where the only people who spend large amounts of money at the cinema are nerds, the movie studios have in their wisdom, and in the pursuit of profits, decided that the world needs another Batman movie.
By my reckoning, if you include the 1940s movie shorts, the 1967 film with Adam West from the TV series, Tim Burton's 1989 film and the subsequent sequels, and the apparently endless numbers of reboots and rerereboots, there are too many Batman movies. To be fair, I like the 1967 movie and the Lego Batman movie because Adam West plays the role so seriously and earnestly as to turn the whole idea of Batman into farce (which given the rest of the series is apt) and the Lego Batman movie which may as well be a parody of itself. I just don't understand why we need more darker and edgier derivations of similar stories.
This is the problem with Batman. The 1939 Detective Comic series, had him play as a detective in the post Art Deco 1930s Gotham, which works reasonably as part satire and part commentary on the then tarnished New York City which had practically created the Gilded Age and the Depression through the art of speculation on the markets by an unsympathetic idle rentier class. Batman was the comic book equivalent of the outworking of The Great Gatsby, had anyone in that novel lived anything other than a destructive unthinking life. Gotham never improves. Batman only makes enemies. The system survives.
During the 1940s and 1950s, something weird happened. Things generally got better for people and rather than sell the idea that people were terrible, the post-war period ended up being this time of a golden age for everyone. As the economic wheel has turned seven full times now (1962, 1974, 1987, 1992, 2001, 2008, 2020) the optimism of the post-war has been spun off and we've now got this new gilded age, in which Batman doesn't do satire and the unsympathetic idle rentier class is applauded and even worshipped. The purpose of Batman exists but nobody really wants to explore it because to do so, means critically looking at the kinds of people who have the money, needed to produce a Batman movie.
Marvel and DC have thrown out so many superhero movies in the last 20 years that the weight of their own work has collapsed in on itself. If I go to the cinema, I want to see a movie which I can have a nice time watching. I don't want to have to have read and seen several peoples' thesis worth of material to have to understand what I am looking at.
"If you think you can do better, why don't you?"
I think I will.
Picture this.
Leave the premise of the story intact. I like the idea that Bruce Wayne is an eccentric aristocrat with more money than sense. Give him a butler and a ward. The story is already daft enough. Here's the rub. Set the story in Gotham. Gotham is a small and rather insignificant village in Nottinghamshire. Gotham and Nottinghamshire are Robin Hood country.
Have Bruce Wayne run an architectural firm by day and by night, make him return to doing the work of a private detective. The villains instead of being these weird flamboyant creations of a strange comic book world which could never have existed, would now become the kinds of petty eccentrics that you'd find in a classic English crime drama.
The Penguin actually does run an umbrella shop on the high street. Mr. Freeze is not a person but an air-conditioning company. The Joker is just the nickname of a man in a green suit who likes to race whippets. Catwoman is one of those delightfully weird ladies who runs a cat sanctuary. Give Batman a Ford Mondeo as the Batmobile. Have the Batcave be a lockup in a backstreet.
The world doesn't need any more darker and edgier retellings of a story which it has heard before and is quite frankly, sick and tired of. The one Batman story that the world hasn't heard in over 80 years, is the one story which Batman was created for; that is, a work of satire which is set against the monied classes. I think that this should be overlaid against an English village because in our current world of plagues, wars, fires, floods, corruption in government, product shortages and unemployment, what we need is not something being darker and edgier but something which involves more tea, jam and scones.
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