How Happy Meals Killed Tim Burton's Batman
2. The Tie-In Deals
It was a Batmania assault that dwarfed all movies around it in terms of licensing partners and while Warner Bros picked up less licensing partners, the number of products and the scale of the campaign was the same as with Batman. In both cases, that meant huge marketing focus even as Warner Bros. consumer products and licensing president Dan Romanelli claimed they "didn't want to overhype the movie."
That's exactly what they needed to do, because that's how you make money. That's why the key partners McDonald's, Diet Coke and the Choice Hotel chain spent $60 million on TV advertising, including scenes from the film to specifically tie in to their products. If you want some scale of how much money that actually was, Warner Bros themselves spent $20m on marketing the entire movie. They were leaning on their partners a lot.
Unfortunately for the partners and McDonald's in particular, they didn't really know the movie they were working with. Working from a rough-cut of the movie - which Burton was still arguing with censors about because of its extreme scenes - McDonald's took the line that Batman Returns was a family friendly film. We can only guess what that rough cut showed, because it absolutely wasn't any of Tim Burton's decidedly not-family friendly Batman Returns.
Their plan was simple: let Batman Returns completely take over their restaurants. In the run-up to the film's release, all of McDonald's branding turned into a Batman campaign. You couldn't get moved for his logo or his face and the lids of every commemorative tie-in cup was turned into a Batdisc that doubled as a flying disc.
And it wasn't just a matter of slapping on some logos and making everything look cooler. McDonald's really committed. The LATimes article reveals that the company transformed all of its more than 9,000 restaurants in the United States and Canada into the "official" restaurants of Gotham City. As McDonald's Corp. public relations manager Susan Bergen said, it was a first for the company:
"We've never before given over our packaging like we have with this promotion. The idea is pleasing to the customers because they feel a part of all the excitement about the movie itself."
They also, obviously, added Batman Returns toys to their Happy Meals and released a series of commercials as an aggressive tactic of taking advantage of the relationship...
That weird choral "it's Batman time at McDonald's" over The Penguin summoning his army perfectly sums up the weird Frankenstein marriage between the two companies and just how much one didn't understand the other. The advertising very much paints the image of the wrong movie - which is even more confusing when you factor in the use of the obvious Darth Vader voice at one point in the voice over.
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