Batman Forever and Batman & Robin have the wrong names.
Don't believe us? Consider: Batman & Robin
is not the movie that introduces Robin; Batman Forever has the number 4 in its title, but is the third movie. Why, the only way they could possibly have screwed up even more would be if the most famous song to come out of any Batman movie were to involve roses, kissing, and even snow, yet somehow not be from the movie that had Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze as the villains. But what are the odds of that happening!
The Tim Burton films were Tim Burton films. The first Scumacher film tried to be grounded, but the studio pushed it away from that and into silliness. And the second Schumacher film is basically Batman '66 made with a late-90s budget. It's camp, it's ridiculous, it's wildly stylized and weightless... you could draw a convincing throughline from David Mazouz to Adam West to George Clooney and claim those three are all one continuity based just on the way their worlds are presented.
Val Kilmer apparently did not get along well on set with Joel Schumacher, so they were both perfectly happy to have Batman recast for this movie. Like we said before, George Clooney was great at playing Bruce Wayne, but his Batman was... not great. In that it was basically just Bruce Wayne again, instead of acting any different. On the plus side, the fact this toy only presents him in his cowl instead of including an alternate unmasked head does mean we avoid the worst part Clooney's portrayal, that god-awful Caesar cut he had at the time. That was not "Bruce Wayne" hair!
At least the suit's nice.
The design is anatomical, with sculpted muscles to better suggest comicbook spandex. These days actors have to nearly kill themselves to put on a thick suit you'd never be able to see through anyway; back then, actors would just have to stay relatively trim and then be given a suit with cartoon six-pack abs. The forearms on this figure are shared with the previous figure, with the same, single, pointy, fin on the glove. The batsymbol is small again, and the belt is smooth.
This suit is entirely black, even more than Michael Keaton's was. That one at least had yellow on the belt and behind the logo, but this one gets nothing. Nothing! Why would you skip those? Even just color the oval would make the suit look a ton more interesting,
something we know for certain because it happened! Between 2000 and 2002, roadside assistance company OnStar licensed Batman from DC comics for their ad campaign, and the suit actor Bruce Thomas wore literally was this one! With the oval painted yellow! They cobbled it together from leftover parts of various stunt suits from Batman & Robin, removed the nipples, and painted the logo (they didn't bother with the belt, since it would be less visible while he was sitting in the car). The same suit was also used in the Birds of Prey TV show, and it also looked surprisingly good there. With yellow.
The articulation on the toy allows for more movement than the actual suit allowed for in the movie; hard rubber glued to a scuba suit is not an easy thing for an actor to move in, ya know? The toy has hinged toes, swivel/hinge/swivel ankles, double-hinged knees, swivel thighs, balljointed hips on hinges, a balljoint waist, barbell chest,
swivel/hinge/swivel wrists, double-hinged elbows, swivel biceps, swivel/hinge shoulders that can pull out of the torso slightly on balljoints, and a balljointed neck that really honors George Clooney's "bobblehead" style of acting. And speaking of Clooney, the figure is done in an 8" scale, and is proportioned like a normal human, which isn't exactly correct: officially Clooney is 5'11", but not according to anyone who's met him in real life; like many classic movie stars, he has a normal-sized head and a small body, which apparently looks better on film than a regular human shape does. So put this head on a 7" scale body and you'd have it perfect! The figure's cape also has posing wires along the sides.
The accessories include a slew of alternate hands, as well as two grappling guns and a simple silver batarang. Most of the time in the movie, they were just using grapnels that shot directly out of their suits, but both of these did show up at various points (though you'd be forgiven for not knowing that, thanks to the frenetic editing). The small one - which is used upside down from the way you think it is - shows
up when they're falling down the furnace smokestack, while the bigger one is seen at the very start of the film when they're grabbing gadgets off the wall, and again at the end when swinging into the frozen observatory (which is why Beast Kingdom calls it the "ice-breaking grappling gun"). That one actually gets a little grappling hook shot from it, with a wire spooling out. The wire is actually bendable metal, rather than just being plastic, so you can pose it differently if you like. Neat! Unfortunately, it seems Beast Kingdom didn't understand what the lightweight launcher was supposed to be, or were working from bad information, because the handle is backwards and there's a trigger guard the real one didn't have. It also doesn't include the bat-hook it fires!
It is wild to think there are only eight years between Batman & Robin and Batman Begins, because it feels like a goddamn century of change between the two. Kevin Fiege has called B&R the most important comicbook movie ever made, because it flopped so hard (c'mon, the Mr. Bean movie made more money!) that studios had to rethink the way they treated superhero films. It's not the worst comic film of 1997 (the year that also saw Spawn and Steel), and George Clooney could have been a good Batman, under different circumstances. He doesn't deserve to be ignored on your toy shelf, so it's good that Dynamic 8ction Heroes has done his standard suit and not his silver ice armor.
-- 09/23/26
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