In 2023, 31 years after the release of Batman Returns, Michael Keaton donned the cape and cowl for a third time in The Flash. We were able to reunite with this version of Batman when Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen went back in time and prevented his mother’s murder, resulting in Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne in the DCEU being replaced with Keaton’s. That said, author John Jackson Miller, who penned the books Batman: Resurrection and Batman: Revolution, opened up to CinemaBlend about why Keaton’s Batman in The Flash felt different to him than the one from the Tim Burton movies.
For context, Resurrection and Revolution not only take place between Batman and Batman Returns, but also exist in a universe where the events of Batman Forever and Batman & Robin aren’t canon, allowing for a new version of Riddler to be introduced alongside other rogues. So Miller obviously knows his way around the Burton-centric Batman continuity several times over, meaning I had to get his thoughts on Michael Keaton’s reprisal in The Flash when I interviewed him. The author started off saying:
It was interesting, always glad to see him… They use the expression ‘your strands of spaghetti’ as the metaphor for the timeline. It does not feel like this is necessarily our strand of spaghetti, because one of the things that they do is something that never happens in the Burton movies, which is they leave Gotham City. Gotham City and the county where the [Bat]cave and Wayne Manor, those are the only places we ever go. We don't see the world around outside it, and we never really see Batman at work during the day.
The “strands of spaghetti” refer to Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne using that pasta to explain to both versions of Barry Allen about how the older one didn’t simply create a branched, Back to the Future-style alternate timeline when he saved Nora Allen, but also affected change even further into the past and far into the future, like a fulcrum. And yet, from John Jackson Miller’s perspective, Keaton’s Batman in The Flash doesn’t feel like the same exact version we met in 1989’s Batman, which Miller called “the most important comic book movie ever made.” That’s because in The Flash, we saw him both don the Batsuit for daytime battles and leave Gotham City to help the Barrys rescue Supergirl in Siberia.
This is a sharp contrast from Batman and Batman Returns, where Bruce never left Gotham City and never beat up criminals when the sun was shining. As far as location goes, John Jackson Miller opted to also keep the action in both Batman: Resurrection and Batman: Revolution focused in Gotham, though he still found ways to expand the story’s scope. He explained:
What I figured is, in our case, we would do the exact same thing in terms of keeping to the city, keep keeping to the county. We do have broader elements in this book. This is a book centering on July 4th and a book that gets into Gotham City's Revolutionary War history and various other things. So the rest of the world is out there, but it's out there the same way Corto Maltese is out there in the original movie, which is it stands in for this notion of a quagmire that the government has been involved in. The existence of DDID nerve gas that would become Smylex stands in for the notion of the military industrial complex doing things.
All this isn’t to say that John Jackson Miller didn’t like Michael Keaton’s Batman return in The Flash, it’s just that in a sense, it felt out of character to see this version of the Dark Knight being active outside of his usual stomping grounds. He wrapped up by telling me:
The thing about The Flash movie is when you bring it all together, they're going on the road. So if it didn't already feel like a different thing just from it being 30 odd years later, it definitely feels like a different thing for leaving the environs of Gotham City.
There was a time when Michael Keaton was going to take over as the DCEU’s Batman, and he’d even filmed scenes for the shelved Batgirl movie. But that era has long since passed, with the DC Universe franchise now set to introduce its own Batman someday in The Brave and the Bold. So it’s unlikely we’ll ever see Keaton play Batman again… although, the same was said when he decided not to do Batman Forever, so I guess anything’s possible!
For now, you can stream all of Michael Keaton’s Batman outings with an HBO Max subscription, and Batman: Resurrection and Batman: Revolution can be purchased wherever you get your books. You’re also welcome to check out DC Comics’ two Batman ’89 comic book series, which show what happened to Bruce Wayne in this Burton-Verse after Batman Returns.
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