Joel Schumacher wants us all to know he’s still so very, very sorry for the cartoonishly bad Caped Crusader catastrophe that was 1997’s “Batman and Robin.”
“I want to apologize to every fan that was disappointed because I think I owe them that,” the 77-year-old director told Vice recently, repeating his apology at the end of the same interview. “I was never a critic’s darling and that was freeing. But look, I still apologize.”
Starring George Clooney and Chris O’Donnell as the Dynamic Duo, “Batman & Robin” was panned by both audiences and critics — garnering 16 and 11 percent ratings on RottenTomatoes.com, respectively.
Even before the movie hit the theaters, Mr. Schumacher was hard at work planning yet another sequel.
“I was set to do another Batman. I even met with Nicolas Cage on the set of ’Face/Off’ because I was going to have him play The Scarecrow,” he told Vice. “Frankly, I was running out of villains.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger, you may recall, famously delivered his campy best as Dr. Freeze in “Batman & Robin.”
Fortunately for fans of the Dark Knight, Warner Bros. put Batman on ice for eight years, with Christian Bale picking up the cowl and Christopher Nolan implementing a successful franchise reboot in 2005’s Cage-free “Batman Begins.”
• Ken Shepherd can be reached at kshepherd@washingtontimes.com.
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