Few people have done more to lead comic books from cinematic punchline to box-office dominance than Michael E. Uslan, who spent a decade trying to sell Hollywood on a dark, serious version of Batman. For the producer and Warner Bros., the eventual reward was Tim Burton’s 1989 hit “Batman,” followed by producing credits on dozens of Dark Knight projects over the last 35 years.
Uslan’s perspective thus seems particularly relevant at a pivotal moment for the superhero movie, which is seeking a resurgence behind “Superman” and “Fantastic Four: First Steps,” with the promising opening for the former suggesting the process might be at least partway there. The longtime producer, after all, has seen his fair share of boom and bust periods for the genre.
Heading into another Comic-Con in San Diego, a convention that has grown along with the interest in all things comics, the reloading of superhero fare also coincides with Uslan reflecting on his life and role in the comic-book movie’s ascendance into the top commercial tier of pop culture, first in a 2019 memoir, “The Boy Who Loved Batman,” and late last year in an eponymous stage version that, after a trial run, Uslan hopes to bring to Broadway next year.
Fighting ‘Batman’s’ decade-long battle
Uslan was barely a kid when he got into comics, working for DC and befriending Marvel’s Stan Lee, and not a whole lot older when he and partner Benjamin Melniker (who died in 2018, at the age of 104) acquired film rights to “Batman” from DC Comics in 1979.
The pair embarked on a frustrating decade-long quest to get someone to treat the character the way he had been in the comics — a creature of the night, as envisioned by artists like Neal Adams, Marshall Rogers and Frank Miller, not the “Wham! Bang! Pow!” campiness associated with the 1960s TV show starring Adam West.
Uslan thought studios would “line up at my doorstep,” he told TheWrap, seeing the potential for sequels and animation, toys and games” when he began shopping Batman. He experienced a degree of shock upon realizing he was talking to older executives that, unlike him and countless baby boomers, hadn’t been weaned on the comic-book evolution that took place in the 1960s with the rise of Marvel and reinvention of DC.
“They were still part of that old generation that had in their memory cells either comic books are bad for you or, at best, comic books are cheap entertainment for little children. Nothing more, nothing less,” Uslan recalled.
According to the producer, one senior studio executive told him flatly Superman was the only comic-book character with any value, and that a dark version of Batman that deviated from the brightly colored TV image would never work.
How Tim Burton cracked the code
Uslan credits director Tim Burton with placing the focus where it belonged, on Batman’s alter ego Bruce Wayne, by “concentrating on the human side of the superhero” in a way that allowed audiences who had never read a comic book to “suspend their disbelief,” buying into the story and organic world of Gotham City as its own character.
“Michael, there would never be a Marvel Cinematic Universe if it wasn’t for ‘Batman’ 1989,” Uslan recalled Lee telling him years after the film came out.
“Batman” broke box-office records with a $40.5 million opening weekend, going on to earn more than $250 million domestically and over $410 million worldwide. Adjusted for inflation, that translates to roughly $650 million in North America and more than $1 billion globally in today’s dollars.
Yet even after that, Uslan noted — paraphrasing Bruce Springsteen, perhaps no surprise for an Asbury Park, New Jersey, native — that the forward progress for superheroes often amounted to “one step forward, two steps back.”
In the case of Batman specifically, that could be seen in the sequels directed by Joel Schumacher, which reflected the studio’s desire to cash in by helping peddle happy meals and toys.
“The decision for Batman was made on a high level that they wanted it to appeal to families and kids and be merchandisable to the extent possible, which is where the tail starts wagging the dog,” Uslan said.
Feeling despondent after “Batman & Robin,” the campiest of the sequels in 1997, Uslan said his partner Melniker was confident that their more serious take on comic book movies would return. And it did, in a big way.
“And as I look back in time, I would say it was worth that period of internal darkness, if not despair, because that’s exactly what happened, and that’s what got the studio to bring aboard the next genius, which was Christopher Nolan, and The Dark Knight trilogy,” he said.
Staying faithful to the source material
That pattern of misreading the market, Uslan said, has played out with other comic-book adaptations, including Superman (whose sequels tell a similar tale). Marvel’s upcoming reboot of Fantastic Four followed multiple attempts ranging from mediocre to disastrous.
It’s a sign of how far the genre has come in today’s age of lavishly mounted blockbusters, as Uslan knows, having produced the 1982 movie based on another DC character, director Wes Craven’s “Swamp Thing.” Made for a mere $1.9 million, Uslan remembers the actor playing the chemically altered monster wearing a rubber suit, with “the zipper in the front for the rear scenes and the zipper in the back for the front scenes. You prayed that the special effects makeup would hold together for more than five minutes before pieces started to fall off.”
If the superhero movie has become a golden goose for Hollywood, Uslan cites a long history of strangling it, usually through what he describes as “over-saturation of cookie-cutter movies, when they just do the same thing over and over again without adding anything to the mix, until we get tired of them.”
Ultimately, the superhero surge of the last few decades hinged on filmmakers who harbored passion and respect for the material, as Uslan put it, “who adored and idolized” signature Marvel creators like Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.
According to Uslan, therein lies the key: Not providing “dark versions” of superheroes arbitrarily — especially if the characters, like Superman, weren’t necessarily originally envisioned as brooding — but remaining faithful to the characters’ essence and what originally made the property popular.
DC Studios co-CEO and “Superman” director James Gunn echoed that point during a recent NPR interview, saying the tone of DC’s upcoming projects were all different — from the grounded HBO series “Lanterns” to the space adventure “Supergirl” to horror with “Clayface” — in ways that intended to honor the source.
“Comic books are not a genre,” Uslan said. “Comic books are westerns, jungle, humor, war, horror, superhero, romance. Anything you can find on the shelves of a bookstore you can find in comic books. It is just our modern-day mythology.”