Release the Schumacher cut! 170-min cut of Batman Forever reportedly exists

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

While everyone has been clamoring for the Snyder Cut of JUSTICE LEAGUE, Warner Bros. may have been hiding another special cut of a particular film in their vault that I desperately would want to see. With the sad passing of Joel Schumacher a few weeks ago, many fans have been looking back on his films and one of the ones that consistently stands out is 1995's BATMAN FOREVER. For better or worse, it's one of his signature films and while it may not be the definitive Batman film, it's still a fan favorite for some. Fans may have something more to look forward to because according to writer and podcaster Marc Bernardin, there exists somewhere in the Batcave a 170-minute director's cut of the film.

During the "Fatman Beyond Podcast," Bernardin sounded pretty confident that this version of the film is somewhere in the Warner Bros. vault:

"I have it on pretty good authority that there exists in the Warner Bros. vault a 170-minute cut of Batman Forever. I think that it went much deeper into his childhood psychosis and his mental blocks and that it was a more serious, darker version of that movie that was one of the first assemblies that Joel filed with the studio and they eventually cut it down because they were like 'it's too dark for kids. We gotta sell these Happy Meals, so maybe let's not invest ourselves in the trauma of childhood murder. 'We've got Jim Carrey, let him do some sh*t."

This actually isn't the first time that this darker version of BATMAN FOREVER has been discussed but I think it was assumed that any proof of it has been wiped clean. It is known that about 38 minutes of extra scenes never made it into the theatrical release that we received and some of these deleted scenes have been addressed by Schumacher in the past. A lot of what was cut really isn't all that important to change much of the film but there are some moments that were removed that could've taken the film in a different direction. For instance, a whole subplot about ‘the red book’ ended up on the cutting room floor. In the finished film’s version of Bruce’s flashback, the young Bruce picks up Thomas Wayne’s diary during his parents’ wake. Lamenting that his father will never write in it again, Bruce grabs the book and runs into the night. He falls down a hole, sees a huge bat, and begins his plans to become Batman. In the longer cut of the film, there was more to it than that and in an extended version of the flashback, young Bruce finds a passage in his father’s diary written shortly before his death that reads “Bruce insists on seeing a movie tonight…”  As we all know, it was that fateful trip to the movies that ended with Bruce's parents being gunned down and discovering this passage in the diary would've consumed Bruce with guilt and he would've felt personally responsible for the death of his parents. This angle might be hard to explore in a film that was made to look like one big circus with a zany Jim Carrey performance. You can check out where Bruce would've spotted that passage at about the two-minute mark in the video below.

There is another scene that was cut where Bruce wakes up with temporary amnesia after being shot by Two-Face and taking a fall. In this incoherent state, he remembers his life as Bruce, but not his time as Batman so Alfred decides to bring Bruce down to “the cave beneath the [main Bat]cave”, where he first came up with the idea to become Batman. You can watch a version of this scene below:

If there are more moments like this to make up the rumored 170-minute cut, it would show that Warner Bros. did go out of their way to cut some of the darker material from the film after feeling like things went too dark with Tim Burton's first sequel, BATMAN RETURNS. That film made it very difficult for Warner Bros. to sell toys and Happy Meals as parents complained about the highly sexualized relationship between Batman and Catwoman and the outright disgustingness of Danny DeVito's Penguin. No matter how people may feel about the overall quality of BATMAN FOREVER, the film did what Warner Bros. needed it to do and it proved to be more successful financially than its predecessor. 

That being said, I'd love to see what other directions the film could've gone in. We could end up getting more silliness for all we know that it would be interesting to see these more adult themes cut back into the film to see if it gives the movie a bit more emotional weight. In the film, Val Kilmer dons the cape and cowl and he must battle former district attorney Harvey Dent, who is now Two-Face and Edward Nygma, The Riddler with the help from an amorous psychologist and a young circus acrobat who becomes his sidekick, Robin, after Two-Face murders his parents. The film also stars Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Nicole Kidman, and Chris O'Donnell.

Would YOU want to see the full 170-minute cut of BATMAN FOREVER?