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Tim Burton has a complicated history with Batman. The director took on the enormous task of bringing the Dark Knight to the big screen for the first time back in 1989, and quickly discovered how tough a challenge it was going to be. Burton claimed that bringing his vision for “Batman” to life was “torture,” and it’s not hard to see why. The film might have made Burton a box office hero, but he had to navigate a fraught production that began with a big backlash against the casting of Michael Keaton and involved constantly pushing back against Warner Bros.’ demands for changes to the script. He even endured being yelled at by a Hollywood legend on the set of the movie.

Thankfully, Bat-mania, as it came to be known, swept the world upon the release of “Batman” in the summer of 1989, and Warner Bros. was suddenly the young director’s biggest fan. For the 1992 sequel, “Batman Returns,” Burton was essentially allowed to make whatever kind of film he wanted, which he dutifully did. “Returns” was the most Tim Burton Batman film you could possibly imagine, complete with a bile-spewing mutant Penguin who was abandoned as a child and left to live in a subterranean hideout completely isolated from society like so many Burtonian outcasts. The movie is, in this writer’s opinion, an absolute masterpiece for the way in which it tricked an entire generation of kids into watching a superhero movie that was actually one of the most impressively realized and unique artistic visions ever put to film. But Warners wasn’t exactly happy with their golden boy’s expressionist nightmare.

When Burton went in to pitch his ideas for a third movie, the studio made it quite clear that it wasn’t interested. In a making-of featurette (via YouTube), the director remembered visiting the Warner offices to discuss the threequel, only to quickly realize he was being replaced. “You don’t want me to make another one, do you?” he recalled asking at the end of the meeting. 

Instead, Joel Schumacher was brought in to replace Burton and deliver a more lighthearted take on the source material with 1995’s “Batman Forever.” That’s exactly what he did, and ever since, Burton has stayed away from the franchise. But that hasn’t stopped him from forming his own opinions of the way the saga went following his departure, and it seems he has some especially strong opinions about the title of the movie he initially was supposed to direct.

It’s been widely reported that before Joel Schumacher came on board, Tim Burton was planning a third movie entitled “Batman Continues.” But this has been debunked in various places, and based on Burton’s recollection about his first meeting with Warners post-“Returns,” it seems very unlikely he had a title in mind. If he had, though, it certainly wouldn’t have been “Batman Forever.” As quoted by Yahoo, the filmmaker revealed in his biography “Burton on Burton” that he particularly disliked the title of Schumacher’s inaugural Batman effort. 

“I always hated those titles like ‘Batman Forever.’ That sounds like a tattoo that somebody would get when they’re on drugs or something. Or something some kid would write in the yearbook.” 

In interviews, Burton doesn’t seem especially bitter about his time on the Batman franchise. As such, it seems likely he just genuinely dislikes the title of “Forever,” which does seem like a strange name for a film that doesn’t really include any allusions to the longevity of Kilmer’s Batman. It’s not entirely clear where that title came from, but perhaps Warner Bros. was trying its best to convince audiences that the franchise would endure following the backlash against “Returns.”

Once Burton was out of the running for the third movie, star Michael Keaton walked away from Batman for good. This cleared the way for Val Kilmer to lead the threequel, with Schumacher introducing audiences to a newly redesigned, neon-drenched Gotham inspired as much by gothic architecture as it was modern Japanese cities. Decades later, “Batman Forever” remains an overlooked entry in the saga that’s much more groundbreaking than it gets credit for, but Burton, aside from his disdain for the title, can’t claim to have had a hand in any of it. He was listed as producer but had almost no involvement, and the film was very much Schumacher and Warner Bros.’ creation.