Batman '89: How Warner Bros Were Forced To Release A Bad Trailer
Yeah, that's not exactly the glossy advert for the film you might have expected from Warner Bros, is it? It's barely even what you'd expect from a group of first year film students. There's no coherent story, there's no hook other than "here is some footage" and there's not even a soundtrack or your standard gravy-voiced "In A World" guy. It's poor.
So what happened?
According to the marketing schedule for Batman, there were no plans to release anything in terms of publicity material to magazines until April 1989, a few months out from the film's release. Trade insiders would have got a look before then, but there was such an air of secrecy about the production (with someone offering a crew member $10k for the first look at the Joker) that it should come as no surprise that their plans looked like that.
Then something went wrong.
Thanks in part to poor production tales, Warner Bros got itchy trigger fingers when they realised that people might not be entirely enthusiastic about the image that was coming out of the film. To the studio's credit, they clearly had enough faith in the project to get this footage out there and let it sell the film without even a good edit to it, but considering the dark arts involved in trailer-making these days, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
It seems that the first look was the teaser trailer that Warner Bros rushed out because they were forced to (out of fear that hype was being killed by bad production stories) they intended to keep it more secret (someone actually offered $10k for a leak of the Joker during filming) the trailer was supposed to come later I’ve found the official timeline for when all advertising was supposed to be rolled out - it seems no marketing materials would have been released before April ’89 as originally intended trailers would have been separate to that, so the first rushed trailer seems to be the one
The whole point of this was not to be a glossy lie in the vein of what Warner Bros' trailer cutting partners would do for Suicide Squad: this was, instead, a desperate attempt to prove that what they'd made was relevant. That it wasn't just a misguided vehicle for an unknown director to channel the destructive 1960s camp of Adam West's Batman with an actor nobody wanted under the cowl.
The fact that it worked is simply astonishing.
Consider how wildly different this is to the Suicide Squad's teasers were and you're looking at two completely different worlds. In the case of the DCEU movie, Warner Bros knew they had something less than great on their hands (hence the studio meddling and the recutting), so they went all out on a trailer that sold us all a lie. That trailer - rather than the film's quality - is why Suicide Squad made enough money to warrant a sequel, even as the embers of the first iteration of the DCEU are quickly dying.
Here, the sale is all about revealing a couple of things: firstly, that Burton hadn't made an Adam West-like camp-fest; secondly, that Michael Keaton didn't look ridiculous as Batman OR Bruce Wayne; and thirdly, that Jack Nicholson's Joker (which the whole thing was so obviously hinged on, thanks to him being given top billing on the poster) lived up to the hype. On those simple objectives (which were in fact HUGELY loaded), it absolutely succeeded.
That doesn't mean it was a great trailer though, but then the idea of the studio being forced into desperate measures by anxiety over its hype is the most fitting thing for a movie production that seemingly had to push water up a mountain from the get-go.