Burton & Schumacher · Elseworlds
Batman Returns
Batman faces the Penguin and Catwoman in a stranger, colder Christmas Gotham.
Nothing after the credits
Availability changes by country and by week, so this searches JustWatch rather than guessing.
Can you skip Batman Returns?
No. It carries part of the main DC throughline, and what comes after it assumes you have seen it. The next essential title is Batman Begins. In chronological order, reaching it takes about 8h 42m of essential viewing across 4 titles. See the full DC order.
Essential, and the strangest major studio superhero film ever released. Burton was given control after the first film's success and made something closer to a gothic fairy tale than a comic adaptation: a Christmas film about three damaged people, set in a snowbound Gotham, with a sewer, a circus gang and a plot to drown the city's firstborn children.
Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman is the best performance in any Batman film. Selina Kyle is an overlooked assistant who is pushed out of a window and comes back wrong, sewing a costume out of a raincoat in a one-room flat while her answering machine plays, and the film treats her breakdown as the most interesting thing in it. Her scenes with Keaton, in and out of costume, are the only romance in the catalogue with any charge.
Danny DeVito's Penguin is genuinely repellent, a biting, drooling creature raised by birds who runs for mayor, and the film commits to the body horror in a way that visibly unsettled its audience. Complaints from parents and from tie-in partners about how disturbing it was are the reason the studio changed direction immediately afterwards.
It is less coherent than the first film and far more interesting. Batman kills several people without comment, which the series has argued about since.
DC guides
Where it sits in the DC order
- Release order
- #8 of 52
- Chronological order
- #8 of 52
- Released
- 19 June 1992
- In-universe era
- Burton & Schumacher
What to watch next
In release order
In chronological order