10 Highest-Grossing '80s Movies Ranked Worst To Best
4. Batman
Year: 1989
Box Office: $251 million
Despite how much praise Christopher Nolan gets for reinvigorating and reinventing Batman for the big screen, it is Tim Burton who deserves the lion's share for ever getting a movie out of the Bat. After all, in the creative wasteland of the period following Adam West's 1966 movie and TV show, there were LOTS of bad ideas about Batman, chiefly including the assumption that he simply wouldn't work as a movie character.
Luckily, the persistence of producers and the wild gamble of hiring both the director of Pee Wee's Big Adventure and his Beetlejuice leading man led to one of the most stylish, confident comic book movies of all time. Seriously, go back and watch it: what Burton does with Gotham's aesthetic is astonishing, Michael Keaton is incredibly good as both Batman and particularly as a Bruce Wayne who seems itchy in his own skin, and Jack Nicholson's Joker is a delight.
It's dark and silly and swaggering in the best Burtonian tradition, vaudevillian in its grandeur and the decision to take leads from the horror genre (which the director would take even further in the sequel) was inspired. It might not have sold lots of toys for Warner Bros, but this is the Batman movie that will age the best of all of them.