Fact-Checking the Myth: Did Mcdonald's Really Fire Tim Burton?

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To understand the merchandising fallout, one must look at the corporate landscape of the early 1990s. The 1989 release of Batman had rewritten the rules of modern film licensing. The original film brought in hundreds of millions in retail merchandise before theatrical receipts were even totaled. T-shirts bearing the yellow oval emblem blanketed schools worldwide. Warner Bros. wanted to double down for the sequel, striking a lucrative multi-million-dollar cross-promotional partnership with McDonald's for a high-profile McDonald's Happy Meal tie-in.

McDonald's manufactured millions of cups, placemats, and four distinct vehicle toys: the Batmobile, the Batmissile, the Penguin's Duck vehicle, and Catwoman's Cat Claw Car. The promotional push rolled out alongside television spots pitching Gotham's vigilante directly to kindergarteners. The commercial machine was running at full speed. There was only one problem: nobody at the burger giant had actually seen the finished film before printing the cartons.

Warner Bros. had granted Tim Burton complete creative autonomy to lure him back for a sequel. Burton had found the first film creatively stifling, agreeing to return only if granted absolute freedom over tone, design, and story. He brought in screenwriter Daniel Waters to pen a dark, idiosyncratic fairy tale. The result was not a studio product engineered to sell plastic toys. It was a dense, expressionistic German-silent-cinema-inspired character study soaked in sexual subtext and pitch-black humor.