<p id=”par-1_39″>When you watch a movie called Batman, you’d expect the Caped Crusader to take center stage. Tim Burton took things in a different direction. It might not have been the best idea, but it was certainly an entertaining idea.</p>
<p id=”par-2_53″>If Burton loves one thing, it’s monsters. Sometimes, his main characters are monsters (Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas), sometimes, monsters take a side role (Alice in Wonderland, Corpse Bride), and sometimes, he takes the conventional route and has his monsters be villains (Mars Attacks!, Sleepy Hollow). Regardless, Burton’s monsters steal the show.</p>
<p id=”par-3_47″>The monster in Burton’s Batman is, of course, Jack Nicholson’s Joker. The movie alludes to The Phantom of the Opera multiple times as if to say that the Joker is a Universal Studios creature for the 1980s. Nicholson steals the show — perhaps a little too much.</p>
<p id=”par-4_66″>Nicholson gets almost all of the film’s oneliners, Prince songs, and Burtonesque grotesqueries. Batman, a true eccentric if there ever was one, seems a little pale in comparison. You walk away from the movie thinking that the Joker would be a lot more fun at parties than Bruce Wayne — if only you could get the Clown Prince of Crime to contain himself for an evening.</p>
<p id=”par-5_24″>Is this a bad thing? Well, one could argue that Batman’s dullness in his first blockbuster screen outing prevents the film from truly soaring.</p>
<p id=”par-6_48″>However, this choice also allows us to get as much of Nicholson’s Joker as you could get in a two-hour movie. So many movies, from Disney cartoons to horror flicks, have villains who are more fascinating than their heroes. Why not just give the audience its villain fix?</p>
<p id=”par-7_33″>Eventually, Hollywood would realize that fans would like a movie that was just about the Joker. That was a little much for 1989. For the time, Burton’s treatment of the Joker was bold.</p>
<p id=”par-8_86″>In 2023, <a href=”https://www.slashfilm.com/1151411/tim-burton-needed-a-jack-nicholson-translator-on-the-set-of-batman/” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>Slash Film</a> reported Burton told Empire that he had some difficulty communicating with Nicholson while making Batman. “Jack has a very abstract way of speaking,” the <em>Ed Wood</em> director said. “So he would say things to me and I’d go, ‘Yeah, I get it,’ and then I’d go to someone, ‘What the f*** was he just talking about?’ So, there was this weird communication: non-linear, non-connective. But, it was very clear to me. I felt like we had a good sort of caveman-style communication.”</p>
<p id=”par-9_95″>Despite this, Burton said that he had a great working relationship with Nicholson. “[Nicholson] protected me and nurtured me, kept me going, by just not getting too overwhelmed with the whole thing,” he said. “I felt really supported by him in a very deep way. I was young and dealing with a big studio, and he just quietly gave me the confidence to do what I needed to do. And him being a voice of support had a lot of resonance with the studio. It got me through the whole thing. It gave me strength.”</p>
<p id=”par-10_13″>It seems that Nicholson held the film together in more ways than one.</p>