10 Groundbreaking Films That Are Actually Terrible

The impact from Tim Burton's Batman was seismic: it paved the way for the superhero revolution in the cinema in the 21st century.

Seminal grim n' gritty comic book stories like Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns had persuaded Tim Burton to sign onto the long-running Batman movie project, having initially balked at a retread of the camp sixties-style Batman.

There was only one real snag with that: Burton wasn't a superhero fan, or an action movie director. He didn’t make blockbuster movies and he had no idea how to handle studio interference. Okay, that’s a lot of snags.

A little distance from the film's massive cultural impact reveals all the cracks. Almost entirely lacking in plot, its inconsistent tone the consequence of dozens of piecemeal rewrites during the shoot, Batman is a mess - no more so than at the end.

The original ending called for the Joker - Jack Nicholson, doing a vaudevillian version of his usual schtick - to murder Kim Basinger’s Vicki Vale, but producer Jon Peters had begun sleeping with Basinger during the shoot and changed the finish without telling Burton, so that the Joker kidnapped her instead. The inexperienced director, who’d completely lost control of the production by that point, began shooting the new ending with no idea where it was going, essentially making it up as he went along.

The confused, slapdash film that emerged from that godawful shoot is far camper than Burton ever intended: a cautionary tale in how not to let a studio run rings around you.