The Bat. The Cat. The Penguin.
Batman Returns (1992)
The monstrous Penguin, who dwells in the sewers beneath Gotham, joins up with corrupt mayoral candidate Max Shreck to topple the Batman once and for all. But when Shreck's timid assistant Selina Kyle finds out, and Shreck tries to kill her, she's transformed into the sexy Catwoman. She teams up with the Penguin and Shreck to destroy Batman, but sparks fly unexpectedly when she confronts the caped crusader.
rating 8/10 User rating 6,965 votes 69% ❄ Christmas Connection
Batman Returns is set entirely during the Christmas season in Gotham City. Snow blankets the city, a tree-lighting ceremony kicks off the plot, and the Penguin's sinister plan targets Gotham's firstborn children in a dark inversion of the Nativity. Christmas isn't background decoration here; it's woven into the film's DNA.
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Our Review
Batman Returns opened in June 1992 as a summer blockbuster, which is one of cinema's great mislabels. Tim Burton's sequel is a Christmas movie from its first frame to its last. Gotham City sits under a permanent blanket of snow, a giant Christmas tree dominates the town square, and the entire plot pivots around a holiday ceremony. That Warner Bros. released it in June says more about studio marketing than about the film itself.
Is Batman Returns a Christmas Movie?
This shouldn't even be a debate. Batman Returns is more of a Christmas movie than half the films that get labeled as such. The opening scene takes place at a Christmas party where the Cobblepots abandon their deformed infant son into the sewers. The Penguin's emergence thirty-three years later happens during Gotham's tree-lighting ceremony. Catwoman's origin story begins on a snowy Christmas Eve. Max Shreck, Christopher Walken's villainous tycoon, uses a Christmas charity ball as cover for his schemes.
Christmas isn't set dressing. It's the film's atmosphere, its mood, its thematic engine. Burton uses the holiday as a counterpoint to the grotesque. Every warm glow of Christmas lights gets twisted by something dark lurking underneath. The result is a film that feels like Christmas viewed through a funhouse mirror.
Tim Burton's Gothic Gotham
Burton was given enormous creative freedom after the first Batman's $411 million worldwide gross, and he spent it building a Gotham that looks like a German Expressionist fever dream decorated for the holidays. Production designer Bo Welch created a city of impossible angles, gargoyle-encrusted towers, and streets perpetually dusted with snow. It looks nothing like any real city. It looks like a place where Batman actually needs to exist.
The Christmas production design is extraordinary. Gotham's town square features an enormous tree surrounded by ice and stone. Department store windows glow with holiday displays. Penguin commandeers a giant rubber duck through snowy streets. The film commits fully to its seasonal setting in a way most action movies never bother with.
Danny DeVito's Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman
Danny DeVito's Oswald Cobblepot is one of the most repulsive villains in any superhero film, and that's a compliment. He spent hours in makeup every shooting day, wore a fat suit, prosthetic nose, and blackened teeth. He bit a man's nose. He drooled black bile. He plotted to kidnap and murder Gotham's firstborn children, a detail that got the film banned from McDonald's Happy Meals mid-promotion.
Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman remains the definitive live-action version of the character. Selina Kyle starts as a downtrodden secretary, gets pushed out a window by her boss (Walken, perfectly cast as corporate evil), and reassembles herself into something dangerous. Pfeiffer did her own whip work. She actually put a live bird in her mouth for the scene where Catwoman bites one. The performance operates on a frequency that's part camp, part genuine menace.
Michael Keaton's Batman, meanwhile, is the quietest lead in a superhero movie. He says relatively little. He broods in his mansion. He finds a strange kinship with Selina Kyle because they're both fractured people wearing masks. Keaton gives Bruce Wayne a sadness that none of his successors quite matched.
Christmas as Corruption
What makes Batman Returns work as a Christmas film is that it takes the holiday's themes seriously, then inverts them. Christmas is about family, warmth, innocence, generosity. Burton's Gotham has a family that throws their baby into the sewer. Warmth exists only in contrast to biting cold. Innocence is the Penguin's weapon of choice. Generosity is Max Shreck's public mask for private greed.
Christopher Walken plays Shreck as a department store magnate who wraps corruption in holiday cheer. He's the smiling face of Christmas capitalism. He hosts charity galas and plots to drain Gotham's power grid for profit. The film doesn't spell this out with speeches. It trusts its audience to see the contrast between what Christmas promises and what Gotham delivers.
The Backlash and the Legacy
Batman Returns earned $266 million worldwide, which was good but not good enough for Warner Bros. after the backlash. Parents complained about the darkness. McDonald's pulled its tie-in promotion. Warner Bros. decided the franchise needed to be "more toyetic," which gave us Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever and Batman and Robin.
Time has been kinder to Burton's vision. Batman Returns regularly appears on "best Christmas movies" lists alongside Die Hard. It's the rare blockbuster that has actual atmosphere, actual point of view, actual willingness to be strange. The final image of Catwoman's silhouette against Gotham's skyline, with the Bat-Signal shining on Christmas night, is one of the best closing shots in superhero cinema.
Fun Facts
Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman costume was vacuum-sealed onto her body for each scene, making it impossible to wear for more than a few minutes at a time. It had to be freshly stitched closed before every take.
Danny DeVito stayed in character as the Penguin between takes, reportedly disturbing cast and crew by refusing to break from the role's guttural mannerisms.
Tim Burton insisted on using real penguins on set. The production brought in king penguins and fairy penguins, some of which were trained to march on command using sardine rewards.
Christopher Walken's character Max Shreck is named after Max Schreck, the German actor who played Count Orlok in the 1922 silent film Nosferatu.
Annette Bening was originally cast as Catwoman but dropped out when she became pregnant. Michelle Pfeiffer was cast as her replacement.
The Penguin's plan to kidnap Gotham's firstborn children was a deliberate biblical reference to the Massacre of the Innocents, a dark parallel to the Christmas Nativity story.
Batman Returns was the last Batman film to receive an Oscar nomination for visual effects until The Dark Knight in 2008.
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