You can’t argue that Batman’s one of the coolest brands out there. Considering he’s been around in print for over 80 years, the subject of tons of movies (both animated and live action), not to mention the cartoons, the merchandise and all that other stuff, he’s the stuff of legend. No question. So with all the love, devotion and fandom that he gets, there’s bound to be an urban legend or two around the Batman franchise that we whisper in hushed corners.
Whether it’s something to with the comics or the films, the dark and anonymous corners of the internet are filled with stories that are supposedly true, written by fans and gaining traction until they’re in the trivia section of IMDB, but not entirely verified. With Justice League coming out soon and a solo Batman film after that, not to mention what’s going on in the comics, we’re not going to run out of our love for the Caped Crusader any time soon, and we eagerly await the stories that are going to be told to us.
But that doesn’t mean we need to necessarily believe these ones. Or do we?
There’s a Batman Curse
This legend has been around ever since the 1960’s tv show with Adam West and Burt Ward. According to the collective consciousness of Batman fans, there’s a curse that strikes people involved with the Batman movies.
Starting back with the 1966 Batman, Burt Ward was nearly killed on his first day of shooting, when he was tossed into the batmobile for a dangerous stunt. While the man driving was a stuntman in a Batman costume, the director said that Ward’s double didn’t look enough like him to make it look plausible. Burt Ward spent several days during his time on the show in the ER for various injuries. After that, during the Burton/Schumacher era, there wasn’t much in the way of the curse until the Dark Knight trilogy.
In that time, you had stuntman Conway Wickliffe killed on a stunt filming The Dark Knight, obviously Heath Ledger’s death, Morgan Freeman was almost killed in a car wreck in 2008, the plane used in the prologue of the third film crashed, killing the pilot, and finally Anne Hathaway’s stunt double was almost killed after crashing into cameras on The Dark Knight Rises set.
Then there’s the infamous case of James Holmes murdering 12 people and injuring 50 at the opening night of TDKR in Aurora, Colorado. Even though it had nothing to do with the film, it lends itself to the mythos of the “Dark Knight Curse.”
The Batman 1966 Set Was An Orgy and Burt Ward Was a Porn Star
Well, it was the swinging 60’s and you had everyone running around in tights, so can you really blame anyone? According to a 1991 “tell-all” expose written by Burt Ward, the set was a constant orgy, with free-running sex, debauchery, threesomes and what made it worse, was a Batman with erectile dysfunction. Apparently the ladies would come in the trailers first thing in the morning and there’d be sex in makeup, sex between the scenes, pleasure in the lunch wagon and then the personal appearances on the weekend with fans. Sounds like my kind of superhero show.
Except it wasn’t really true. Ward admitted later that he was goaded by the publishers to make his autobiography more scandalous, including his vengeful claims against Adam West. He could get it up just fine and there was a normal about of sex behind the scenes.
As for Ward being a porn star – that came from Ward’s struggles to find work post-Batman. Somewhere along the way, a comment he made about thinking he’d auditioned for a porno when Batman producers pulled off his pants and inspected his junk to see how it’d look in tights, made everyone think he was using his Robin schlong to make money. In fact, he married into a millionaire family and didn’t really need to work after his time on the show.
Disney Owns all the Critics
You have to admit that there’s something going wrong with Rotten Tomatoes, when Batman v Superman & Suicide Squad do far worse than other cinematic travesties like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. No, they’re not the best films out there, and they are incredibly flawed, but you know what? I enjoyed the hell out of watching Batman beat the shit out of Superman and I applaud the unconventional approach that Suicide Squad took to telling a sympathetic story about DC Villains. But given that, there’s a rumour/legend that Marvel/Disney financed critics, who flooded the web with poor reviews to make sure that the DC films didn’t do well.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t really put a lot of stock in critics. They’re writers and journalists, clawing for every eyeball, every click, every ad impression they can get, just like the rest of us. You write what sells, and I watch what I like.
Those DC films didn’t break $1 Billion at the box office because of critics, they failed to hit the mark because of fans.
There Was Going to be a Dark Knight Tie-In Video Game
Before Rocksteady put themselves on the map with the amazing Arkham series, Pandemic Studios had a plan for an open-world Batman game that tied into The Dark Knight, in 2008. News of the adaptation wasn’t widely broadcast and it was all kept hush hush, making it seem like the origins of this mythical game were steeped in legend; especially when no such game came out when the film hit theatres, then later when it hit BluRay. So what happened?
There really was a game in progress, and the cast of the film was in the process of preparing to start their voice-overs, when the game was scrapped due to the game studio not hitting their schedule. They became too ambitious and there was no way that the game was going to be delivered on time, so it was quietly killed, and the Pandemic office in Brisbane, Australia that was developing it, was shuttered.
Christian Bale Was Asked to Reprise His Role for Batman v Superman
This never happened, and even if they’d asked, the answer would have been no. The Nolan Bat-Trilogy was so well contained as a story of that particular incarnation of Batman, that it wouldn’t have made sense to bring Bale back, and Bale agreed.
This most likely came from fans, sad at the end of the trilogy, to try to bring back one of the best actors to play Batman, and they came up with insane rumours of WB offering large sums of money to Bale to return. When asked, Bale quickly refuted those claims.
He’d never had a conversation about being Batman again, and felt that Ben Affleck, as an older, wearier Batman was the right way to go, and building a new universe with a Batman up against Gods and aliens was the way to move the DC universe forward.
Bob Kane Deliberately Diminished Bill Finger’s Role in Batman’s Origins
Quick history lesson. Batman was created by artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger in 1939. Both men had a hand in creating the iconic hero we know now, but somehow, along the way, Bill Finger started to get left off the bylines in the mid-60’s and Bob Kane was credited as the sole creator.
Every time that Finger tried to assert his involvement, he was threatened with legal action and Kane was notorious for crushing the perception that Finger had any part of it, in the media. His only proof was claiming that if Finger really was a part of Batman’s conception, he’d have had a credit all along, but since he didn’t, he was a liar. All this was declared in an open letter in 1965 and anyone that disputed this was threatened with legal action.
Bill Finger died in 1975, without the recognition he deserved and it took until 1989, when Tim Burton’s Batman was released, for Kane to admit to Finger’s involvement, admitting that he had regrets for how Finger was treated by him.
Batman Was Almost Cancelled in the 60’s
This one is probably untrue. In the 60’s, things were kind of tough for the comics industry, and DC execs admitted that they weren’t sure what to do with Batman, as his sales were flagging, but then suddenly they hired new artists and gave Batman a sleeker, darker look.
While his individual issues weren’t selling, Batman was still all over the covers and a a part of other teams. He was still outselling JLA, Flash and Green Lantern and was only just behind the Superman comics. So instead of letting him go, they doubled down on a new strategy and paved the path for the darker Batman we have today.
Jai Courtney Went the Method Route for Suicide Squad
There’s two kinds of actors out there; the kinds that can just switch on their talent at will and go on set and act the hell out of a scene; and the kinds that go method and just embody their character for the duration of the shoot. On Suicide Squad Jai Courtney and Jared Leto, went method. And while the media was all over Leto’s ‘odd’ gifts to his cast mates and his crazy behaviour, not a lot was said about the rest of the cast, especially Courtney. Director David Ayer wanted to make sure that he was getting the best performances from his cast, so he gave them some odd instructions and leeway.
He told them to go into the woods alone, read the psychology of murder and throw self-restraint out of the window. Given that instructions, it was Courtney who took it the furthest, taking drugs, burning himself with cigarettes and studying the histories of the worlds worst psychopaths.
Then he’d call Ayer on Skype and scare the shit out of him.
The Best Part of The Dark Knight Was Ad-Libbed
I’ll probably get some heat for this, as it shows up on every. single. list. about how great Heath Ledger’s performance was, and while I’m completely in that camp (he was fucking brilliant), I call shenanigans on this one.
Movie sets, and pyrotechnic effects such as this are meticulously planned, and there’s no way that a mistake like charges not going off as planned, would have happened. So while it’s romantic to think that Ledger just ad-libbed this amazing sequence, he didn’t.
You can see in the BluRay special editions that the scene was shot as shown in the final cut, with the pause deliberately placed there so he’d be beside the hospital. The scene was rehearsed over an over again, until the timing was right, so unfortunately, no spontaneous brilliance on Ledger’s part. That’s not to say that he didn’t come up with that idea in rehearsal, and they built the scene that way, but what the camera’s captured, was what was intended all along.
Bill Murray Was Almost Batman
You know we love Bill Murray over at TheCHIVE, and we’d have this on repeat if it ever happened, but it never did. Nor was it supposed to happen the way the internet says it was.
Yes, once upon a time, Bill Murray was suggested as the lead of the film, but it wasn’t for Burton’s version of the film. Ivan Reitman, known for Ghostbusters, Stripes, and Meatballs, wanted to direct a comedic version of Batman in 1985, with Eddie Murphy as Robin based off of a treatment written by Tom Mankiewicz.
When that kept going through rewrites, Reitman, Murray and Murphy dropped out and Tim Burton was hired. Finding the current script too campy, the rewrote it into the fantastic 1989 Batman with Michael Keaton, and while WB may have tried to shoehorn Murray back into the film, there was no way that he fit into Burton’s vision.
Trump’s Inauguration Speech was Stolen From Bane
It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s an ‘alternative fact’ in the media these days, but this urban legend isn’t quite as cut and dried as it would seem. Yes, there were elements in Trump’s first speech as the President of the United States that have similarities, but it’s not a direct lift. Take a look:
Here’s Trump:
“But we are transferring power from Washington D.C. and giving it back to you… the people. For too long a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have born the cost.”
Here’s Bane:
“We take Gotham from the corrupt! The rich! The oppressors of generations who have kept you down with myths of opportunity, and we give it back to you… the people. Gotham is yours. None shall interfere.”
So while the speech shares some sentiments and an overall similar theme, it’s not a direct copy.
But it is a little similar for comfort.
Playing the Joker is what Killed Heath Ledger
According to all the media and mythology around his death, as well as the disclosure of Ledgers “Joker Diary”, it’s easy to say that the experience of shooting The Dark Knight caused him mental trauma. He was too disturbed by his role that he suffered from insomnia and needed sleeping pills, and that was the cause of his death. In fact, the role has very little to do with it.
At the time of his death, Ledger was in the midst of filming his role in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and with all the outdoor shooting, he had caught a cold. He was also suffering from insomnia, but that was something that was always present with him. According to his sister, in an interview in the upcoming documentary called I Am Heath Ledger, the night before he died, he was laughing and joking; excited about his role and looking forward to the next one. He wasn’t depressed or distressed in any way.
It was just one of those eerie circumstances, where things that could go wrong, do and it took the life of a talented actor.
Still the best Joker in cinematic history.
H/T Whatculture
