10 Movies Where The Director Hated The Source Material

6. Batman (1989)

Tim Burton's 1989 Batman was a major milestone in Hollywood actually taking superhero movies seriously, yet despite its critical and commercial success, many fans took umbrage with Burton and writer Sam Hamm's departures from established aspects of the Dark Knight's lore.

For starters, Batman (Michael Keaton) liberally murders people throughout the film, worst of all The Joker (Jack Nicholson) himself in the film's climax.

Furthermore, The Joker is retconned to be the killer of Bruce Wayne's parents - rather than thug Joe Chill as in the comics - and Burton included goofy eccentricities such as having Bruce sleep upside down. Like a bat, get it?

This all boiled down to the fact that Burton, by his own admission, isn't a comic book fan, and though he enjoyed the elemental images and ideas of Batman and The Joker, didn't really care for the style or storytelling of comics as a medium.

In Burton's own words, "The reason I've never been a comic book fan - and I think it started when I was a child - is because I could never tell which box I was supposed to read."

Burton did confess to getting some joy out of Alan Moore's revisionist Joker comic The Killing Joke, but as far as classic Batman comics go, he just wasn't interested, and therefore had little desire to faithfully represent it on the big screen.

But ultimately, Burton wasn't even that fond of the final film. He later said, "I liked parts of it, but the whole movie is mainly boring to me. It's OK, but it was more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie."