In 1989, fans were up in arms about the casting of Michael Keaton as Batman. So producer Jon Peters cut a trailer.
When word got out that Michael Keaton would be playing Batman, fans of the comic just didn’t see the comedic actor as the man who could embody the Caped Crusader. This was a return to the camp of the sixties series, fans worried. Someone even wrote that “By casting a clown, Warner Brothers and Burton have defecated on the history of Batman.”
The story was picked up by the Wall Street Journal, which put it on the paper’s front page: according to Tom Shone in his book Blockbuster, this led to a decline of financing studio Warner Brothers’ share price. To quell growing public outrage, Jon Peters, one of the movie’s producers, cut a 90-second trailer without narration or music, simply scenes from the movie. It contains many of the film’s more iconic moments, although not, alas, the Joker’s line about never rubbing another man’s rhubarb.
Batman ’89 original trailer:
[…] Based on a 1980s comic by California-based artist Dave Stevens and directed by Joe Johnston (Honey I Shrunk the Kids, 1989), The Rocketeer is Disney’s second attempt at a comic-based movie in as many years. I’m counting 1990’s Dick Tracy. Though based on a comic-strip character as opposed to a comic book character, Dick Tracy (released through Disney’s less kid-friendly division Touchstone) nonetheless shared a lot of the elements of comic book-based movies of the time, especially Tim Burton‘s Batman. […]