I would support that! I remember seeing the Living Daylights in a theater not sure on License to Kill. Remember watching it on VHS and cable though. My Dad took us to a lot of movies. That year was very overcrowded though. First knowledge that Star Trek 5 even existed was seeing a cardboard display of Spock in a Video Store much later on.
Yeah, I think Batman basically clobbered all of the competition except for Indiana. I remember an interview with Dan Akroyd where he basically conceded that they were foolish to go up against Batman & that’s why they didn’t get a GB3. Bond also got creamed in the USA and Dalton’s tenure as 007 stalled, never recovering. And of course STV was a bit of a flop too.
That's because for 1989's Batman, NO ONE was going to see it because of Michael Keaton or 'Batman'; it was Jack Nicholson's take on The Joker the majority of people were interested in (As he was known for giving great performances to insane characters, and The Joker was REALLY insane. I remember many a entertainment reporter and reviews saying, "Yeah, this film should really be called 'The Joker'..." Nicholson was the main draw for interested audiences on this film back in the day.
Also from 1989, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, which released a third movie last year. And The Karate Kid Part III, which has Cobra Kai. Even Troop Beverly Hills is somehow getting a sequel. Can Weekend at Bernie's III be far behind?
I have to disagree. This was promoted as a Batman movie. All the posters I saw were of the Batman Logo. It was none of the cast. The main draw was Batman. The audience didn't consist of people who knew Nicholson. It was an audience that grew up on the Batman 1966 show and the constant reruns.
Disagree all you like, but I recall the coverage and promotion of the film first hand (I was 26 in 1989, and yeah, most people I know were more interested in seeing Nicholson's take on the Joker than Keaton's take on Batman. Most people were remembering Nicholson's performances in "The Shining" and "The Witches of Eastwick" in leading up to this role as The Joker. As for the batman 1966 fans, they were upset Adam West wasn't even considered (when the film started production Batman the series was off the air for only 18 years, and the Star trek TV cast showed it was possible); and that he didn't even get any sort of cameo.
I’m with @Noname Given on this one @Saul. I take the point about the posters, marketing etc, but for most people, journalists and critics, the buzz was about Nicholson. Many, if not most viewers, still thought of Batman as being like Adam West and were taken aback by the idea of a dark Batman film that would hold its own opposite Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, etc. It was definitely Nicholson that intrigued a lot of people. That, and the fact that it was the most hyped film until The Phantom Menace a decade later.
Yeah, I believe the Keaton casting was considered quite odd at the time. But, I was quite young when it was released. Though, I was annoyed at the distinct lack of Adam West.
I liked the New 52 Supergirl, especially her initial run with the Green/Johnson/Asrar creative team. I was even one of the few who liked her costume. It's true that DC didn't much seem to know what to do with her, however, and the book did go off the rails at several points. In any case, Sasha Calle's version will doubtless be very much its own thing, and I can't wait to see what that turns out to be. That's putting it mildly. But of course, it turned out to be a stroke of casting genius, that resulted in what remains the best screen version of the character to this day.
Well, there was a fain amount of attention--in the form of controversy about Keaton's casting as Wayne/Batman, since he was a balding, nonathletic comedic actor who looked nothing like the comic character who had trained himself as close to perfection as possible in order to wage his war on crime. That said, the on-again, off-again Batman movie scripting, announcements, etc., throughout the early to mid 1980s had a number of trade publications theorizing about who might portray The Joker if he turned out to be the villain, with actors such as a young Willem Dafoe's name mentioned (based in part on his performance in 1984's Streets of Fire), along with Nicholson. The essential difference between TOS' cast returning is that their actors & the characters they developed were taken seriously; they were not some quasi adventure/parody like the West/Ward series, and in the 21 years between Batman's cancellation (actually, even while it was first run on ABC) and the premiere of the Burton film, the general consensus among comic fans was that the '66-'68 TV series (and West) disrespected the character (I've posted some 60s Batman / Detective Comics reader letters making such complaints some time ago) while regular audiences wrote it off as silly. TOS--in only a couple of years after its cancellation was considered and respected as a cultural milestone (and one of the best examples of filmed sci-fi) so when the rumors of Trek returning as Phase Two, then the movie were white hot, not only was there a natural expectation that the TOS actors would return, but they--unlike West--were not considered "wrong" or something to be laughed off. Regarding West not getting a cameo, again, he was not taken seriously and in theory, could have been considered a possible distraction. That's the opposite of the effect I recall from Kirk Alyn's cameo in Donner's Superman, since Alyn was thought to have been a great Superman in his serials, so his appearance was very, very welcome.
I saw License to Kill, and Living Daylights, on their opening weekends. After growing up with Roger Moore and having read the novels by that point, Dalton was so much closer to what Bond was supposed to be that I loved him in the role. License to Kill could have been an actual novel. People wanted gadgets and a suave Bond back then unfortunately. It took until Daniel Craig to get another actor who understood how Bond was written on the page.
That's just not true. Nicholson was at the height of his popularity back then and he knew it. That's why his contract gave him a percentage of the film's earnings (but that may be apocryphal). He was the main draw for the film and why it was such a hit.
Agreed. My friends and I were all 16ish at the time and we couldn't have cared less about Nicholson, we were there because it was the first live-action high budget badass Batman movie in our lifetimes. And we all loved it (well, except my friend Jerry who just took exception to the Batmobile's shields purely on a physics level).
Going back to Injustice for a second. Are we going to get that scene of Alfred kicking Superman so hard that his shoe (and sock) disintegrates? lmao
Does this mean Batman Forever is non-canonononon???!?!?! Seriously tho, I have hope they'll go for Burton's visual style. I had been expecting Keaton transplanted into a generic modern city setting rather than Burton's ultra gothic Gotham.
Exactly! As I said I turned 11 that summer and did not know who any of the actors where before that. But that changed quickly. I remember vividly Taco Bell selling a series of plastic cups with images from the movie. In the restaurant there was a movie poster with the Nicholson and Keaton billing. Seriously I remember wondering as a kid why the Joker got listed before Batman himself! LOL I learned quick though. Probably from movie magazines. That was the year I began fascinated by behind the scenes aspect of making movies. Having grown up with a copy of Superman The Movie on VHS as long as I can remember after Batman came out I first started to notice Jor-El and Lex Luthor were in the credits before Superman himself. Which lead to understanding why that was done that way. No I am not claiming that all happened when I was 11. But from a young age I was a sponge for absorbing any info I learned about film and tv making and putting the pieces together.
For me and my friends, at that time, Nicholson was the old guy in Terms of Endearment and the devil in Witches of Eastwick. We were AWARE he had been in other stuff, but it wasn't stuff for us, and we didn't care. And considering where I saw it was mostly people our age, I can't imagine we were the only ones.