George Clooney Learned To Look For Good Scripts After Batman And Robin

1997 Batman and robin, which was director Joel Schumacher’s second Bat-flick and star George Clooney’s first (and only) batting player to play Bats, was a box office bust that killed Warner Bros. ‘first Bat-franchise, ending the run that began with Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989. Recently, George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer, who both starred in One Fine Day together in 1996, have appeared together for Variety actors over actors, and during the conversation, Clooney told Pfeiffer, who was herself in the same franchise’s Batman Returns, what he had learned from being in such an expensive flop.

Clooney, who for many years insisted that his performance was also a big part of the film’s failure, even going so far as tell Ben Affleck not to play Batman when offered the role for the first time in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, decided to go ahead focusing on whole projects and not just his role in them.

“After Batman & Robin came out, and it was a big bomb – you learn from your failures; you don’t learn from successes,” he said. “So I thought, I had to really focus on the script. It’s not just my role; it’s the whole movie. The next three movies I shot were Out of Sight, O Brother, Where Art Thou? And Three Kings, which were really good scripts. They weren’t all very successful financially, but they were all very well received. “

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“It became clear to me that you can make a bad movie with a good script, but you can’t make a good movie with a bad script,” Clooney added. “I’m drawn to the parts that I’m interested in. They don’t always work out in the end, because there are so many things that can go wrong, including me.”

You can read the IGN review of The Midnight Sky here, George Clooney’s latest film, available to stream on Netflix.

Meanwhile, Matt Reeves’ The Batman, which has had a turbulent production schedule this year due to the pandemic, is now release scheduled for 2022, as the movie industry continues to adjust its schedule. And in other Bat-news DCEUs, Michael Keaton’s Batman set to make an appearance in the Flash movie, opposite Barry Allen of Ezra Miller.

Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.