Batman Returns is probably my favorite Batman movie.
Think of the Burton movies as Elseworld tales. You'll enjoy his movies much better that way.
They are certainly better than the two crap movies that followed!
Nolan 'verse Batman baddies we'll never see.
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Batman Returns is probably my favorite Batman movie.
Think of the Burton movies as Elseworld tales. You'll enjoy his movies much better that way.
They are certainly better than the two crap movies that followed!
Well, it'd work. The Penguin's one of my favourite Batman villains as far as that goes, but he - in my mind at least - needs to be someone with deliberately aristocratic tastes. He can be a boss of the criminal underworld but he'd still need to be one that wouldn't look out of place in a gala opening of the Gotham Met (or whatever Gotham's opera house assuming it exists is called).
I don't really like the Riddler at all, but David Hyde Pierce? I am already sold. I choose to imagine he would act like he does in this trailer:
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S1dovoZ6bM[/yt]
Likewise.
To be honest as someone who isn't a comic book fan but is a fan of German Expressionist movies, the Tim Burton films - and Returns in particular - are fun on that count alone. There's a villain named Max Schreck, for god's sake.
Also: Max Schreck. There's a pretty grounded villain who will never appear, probably because as I understand he's not had much of an afterlife post Returns.
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Well, I don't know if I agree with that assumption. I think part of the reason Harvey went on a revenge kick in The Dark Knight was that he knew he only had a little while left to live. But I digress.
Maybe. They probably would have to tone down the extreme temperature differences and would need to cut the sci-fi freeze ray gun bit, but the emotional core of the character as re-interpreted in Batman: The Animated Series might be enough to carry his arc. Certainly the Nolanverse has skirted on the edge of realism before.
I absolutely agree that the Penguin could work that way in the Nolanverse. But the problem would essentially be that it would feel repetitive; the Penguin would just end up feeling like a gimmicky mafia boss, but one who plays up to English stereotypes instead of Italian stereotypes. He'd just end up being a posh, ethnically English version of Carmine Falcone.
Hm. I mean, she could work, maybe, as a non-superpowered eco-terrorist. But they'd probably need to cut her superpowers entirely -- which I think would hurt the character, frankly, because the essence of Poison Ivy is the dichotomy between her sexuality and her physical alienation from other people. She plays into the archetype of the Temptress or Succubus, and without those superpowers, the character loses a lot of its emotional power.
Well, Jim Carrey in Batman Forever was essentially just playing a hyped-up, Carrey-fied version of Frank Gorshin's Riddler from the Adam West Batman TV series. So I don't think it's fair to just attribute that to Carrey.
The Riddler might be the most promising supervillain in a hypothetical future Nolanverse film. A darker, more intellectual serial killer, as you imply, or perhaps a political terrorist. (Nolan loves using Batman villains to ask challenging questions about the health of American politics, after all.) Something like a slightly Batmanified Se7en, perhaps.
Well, I love Danny DeVito's Penguin as much as Burgess Meredith's. It helps that my mother brought me to see Batman Returns when I was 6 years old, and thus I didn't have any preconceptions about what the character "should" be.
Ooooh. I really like this idea. I was thinking Benedict Cumberbatch, but Tennant is better.
As for other options...
For supervillains, Black Mask, Hugo Strange, and Hush all come to mind.
With reservations, Harley Quinn, the Mad Hatter, and Mr. Zsasz are also options. It would probably be a bad idea to do Harley without bringing back the Joker; it would just feel like a re-tread.
The Mad Hatter might be a little bit too fantastic in his modus operandi, though it would present an interesting opportunity to explore the boundaries of sexuality, power, and rape in a crime fiction context. That might be too dark for a film that still has to be able to be accessible for children even when its primary audience is adults, though.
They've already touched on Mr. Zsasz in Batman Begins, but there's no reason I'm aware of that he couldn't be one of the Arkham escapees let loose upon the Narrows in the finale of the first film.
Holiday came to mind at first, but it occurs to me that the general political development that Holiday heralds in Batman: The Long Halloween -- the fall of Gotham's organized crime families and the rise of the fantastic supervillains -- has already been accomplished in the Nolanverse's The Dark Knight by the Joker.
For general organized crime antagonists, there's still Lew Moxon, Rupert Thorne, and Tony Zucco. They'd probably need to be supporting roles, though, since the Gotham mafia families have been drastically reduced in power as of Dark Knight.
Random thought: I always wondered why we never saw Harvey Bullock in The Dark Knight. Keith Szarabajka's Detective Gerard Stephens (the one the Joker tricks into beating him and then takes hostage to get out of lockup) certainly plays on some of the same visual archetypes that Bullock plays into. But I digress.
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Jetfire
Guest
Henry Cavill would make an excellent Superman. 
^ Chris Nolan and Zack Synder agree 
Oliver Platt could also work as The Penguin.
Well she could still work as a non-super powered eco-terrorist but that doesn't mean she can't have some of Poison Ivy's abilities. Communicating with plants, or certain types of plants, could be worked in fairly easily within the thin line of sci-fi/unrealistic aspects of the Nolan-verse. I mean it's already a universe with the water/nerve toxin of Scarecrow's and with an immortal Ra's. Just say she's familiar with a certain, rare, species of plant that has some simple animal characteristics. Combine that with, perhaps, "genetic engineering" to maybe cause them to grow quickly and move and then you've got a plausible character that'd work in reality of the Nolan-verse.
Her poisonous aspects, obviously work in nicely. Poison lipstick, poison-tipped darts and other weapons are all possible or at least plausible.
The hardest thing would be making her the primary villain; making her threat to Gotham big enough to stand on her own and to require Batman to come in and take care of it and to make him weak to her which, again, could probably be done with saying she uses a synthesized pheromone created from an exotic plant.
I disagree from above that Christina Hendricks would work, but that's mostly because I find her vastly overrated and, IMHO, Poison Ivy is supposed to be more exotically beautiful and remarkable. As good looking as Hendricks is, I don't see her as that exotic.
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Jetfire
Guest
Elena Satine as Poison Ivy!
That's a little more like it. Hendricks is too much of a... woman to do Poison Ivy who has quite a bit of "girl" to her if any of that makes any sense at all.
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Jetfire
Guest
I always thought Elena could have made a great Mary Jane in a Spider-Man movie too...I liked her in our favorite soap SMALLVILLE as Mera.
I knew she looked familiar.
Ahhhh. Mera.
Ahhhh. Mera.
Elena did have a self promotional campaign for Mary Jane in "The Amazing Spider-Man" but I don't think she actually did an audition. She was great as Mera though
No, Ra's al Ghul is never established, nor even implied, to be immortal in Batman Begins.
The idea of a "plant with simple animal characteristics" is so far over the top, so removed from reality, that it's really not compatible with the Realism/Naturalism of Nolan's films. You're talking about a fundamental departure from reality -- more extreme than Crane's hallucinogen, or Harvey clinging to life after his burns. It doesn't pass the "plausible if you squint a bit" test. It works in the DC Universe, but I really don't think it would work in the Nolanverse.
Poison weapons pass the "plausible-if-you-squint" test. But the essence of Poison Ivy is that she's preternaturally attractive yet biologically poisonous; her kisses are deadly because her biology is deadly. This doesn't pass the "plausible-if-you-squint" test; it's fundamentally fantastical. And if you have a Poison Ivy who's just an eco terrorist with some poison weapons, well, you've really stripped the character of what makes it relevant or interesting. You might as well not bother, in my opinion.
ETA:
The more I think about it, the more I suspect Mister Freeze doesn't really pass the "plausible-if-you-squint" test. It might work if the emotional power of his arc distracts us from the implausibility of his biology, but I suspect that it would clash with the fundamental creative conceits that Nolan established in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.
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Jetfire
Guest
I couldn't stop starring at her in that ep...she made Erica Durance look like yesterday's garbage.
The more I think about it, the more I question what the purpose of doing a Poison Ivy storyline in the Nolanverse would be. There would be a risk of it, frankly, coming across as being too gratuitously sexual, and therefore exploitative.
And what would be the purpose of an "eco-terrorist" storyline? I mean, you can do a storyline about climate change, I suppose, but I don't see how doing one where the villain is the one who opposes pollution and human encroachment on the natural environment would be coherent, unless it ends up with an unapologetically corporatist message.
And what would be the purpose of an "eco-terrorist" storyline? I mean, you can do a storyline about climate change, I suppose, but I don't see how doing one where the villain is the one who opposes pollution and human encroachment on the natural environment would be coherent, unless it ends up with an unapologetically corporatist message.
We already had an eco-terrorist for one, in Ra's. I could easily see Ivy having been secretly employed as a top biochemist for the League of Shadows through front organizations or what not. I can see Ivy working quite nicely actually in the Nolan'Verse.
I couldn't stop starring at her in that ep...she made Erica Durance look like yesterday's garbage.
Well...
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Jetfire
Guest
They had Erica up against Elena alot in that ep...I think Erica is attractive...but Elena was far more appealing and new...most viewers have seen ED since S4.
I disagree. Ra's in Batman Begins wasn't the ecology-minded villain he is in the comics; when he talks about the League of Shadows's goals, he makes it clear that they're more about fighting what they perceive as decadence and corruption than the environment.
But to what artistic end? What would be the purpose of depicting a Poison Ivy whose cause is decent but not her ends? That sort of arc might work in a long-running comic, but it seems strange for a film series that hasn't addressed ecological issues in the past to address it for the first time in such a form. And, frankly, I question what relevance ecology issues have to a film series that has been thematically more concerned with the relationship between urban crime and political legitimacy.
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