The Story of How BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM Got Made and Ended Up in Theaters
The 1993 animated film Batman: The Mask of the Phantasm is one of my favorite Batman movies. It was awesome, and it was so cool that we got to see it on the big screen! While that was cool for fans of Batman: The Animated Series, it wasn’t cool for the creative team. That whole theatrical release was a surprise for the creative team, and it came with some problems they had to overcome.
Writer and producer Alan Burnett was working on a CGI version of Gotham City for the opening of the show which was a new thing at the time for animation. When an executive from Warner Bros. came in and saw it, he told Burnett, “You know what? We should make this a feature film.”
At the time, the team being Batman: The Animated Series had no plans of doing longform storytelling but WB wanted it. Producer Eric Radomski explained: “There was a desire to do longform, and it was always intended to be direct-to-video, because the direct-video market was new at the time and very lucrative. Companies were all making major dough on releasing stuff.”
Producer Paul Dini said that this film ended up being a passion project Burnett. “He started to work with the idea of ‘I wanna write a really good Batman story, and that means a really good Bruce Wayne story, and a good detective story.’ At that time, I was all for ‘Oh, you’ve gotta put a bunch of freaky villains in there and we can do all this weird stuff with all the characters.’ Alan really did not want it to be a free-for-all. He wanted it to be a romance, and he wanted it to be a dark story. He wanted it to be built around Bruce Wayne’s heart and the choices he’s made.”
He certainly captured all of those things in the movie! It was a perfect balance of all of that! In the story, the troubled yet heroic Batman (Kevin Conroy) is pitted against a mysterious figure who is rubbing out Gotham City's most dangerous criminals, and who many believe is the caped crusader himself. Batman's alter ego, millionaire Bruce Wayne, is about to get married to the lovely Andrea Beaumont (Dana Delany), who helps him recover from his need to avenge his parents' murder -- meaning that his crime-fighting days may be numbered.
The production of the film was dived up between all of the directors on the show. Those directors included Kevin Altieri, Boyd Kirkland, Frank Paur, Dan Riba, Eric Radomski, and Bruce Timm. This allowed them to continue to work on the series as they were developing the film. While they were developing the movie, they were also developing the next 20 episodes of the show.
Co-creator and producer Bruce Timm also revealed that animation production was split up between a Korean studio and a Japanese studio. It was on one of these trips to Japan or Korea where Radomski and Timm got a call from WB saying they wanted to release the film theatrically!
Radomski shared his reaction to this, saying: “Literally the last day when I was in Asia, I got a call from our vice-president at the time, who was the money guy, and he said that Warner decided that they wanted to release this in the theater, and my jaw hit the floor — not in a good way. I was like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? We designed this to be on video! That means a whole host of problems in terms of technical and quality! You guys are out of your mind!’”
Timm went on to explain everything they’d have to do to make this work: “That means we have to change the aspect ratio, because we had storyboarded the entire film for the TV aspect ratio, which back then was a square. How are we going to finish this movie on time without having to re-board every single shot? So, while we were there, Eric and I, on a piece of paper, cut out the Academy aspect ratio on a sheet of paper and laid it down on top of the storyboards, and went, ‘Okay, it kind of works.’”
He went on to talk about dealing with other executives on the studio lot and the challenges they faced with the theatrical people: “Once it became a theatrical release, suddenly we had a lot more interest from people on the lot. We had to suddenly start taking notes from all these different branches of the business that we had not had to report to before. When it was just a video release, it was just kind of like, ‘Okay, yeah, whatever, it’s a kids’ show. Get it out there. Whatever.’ But the minute it’s a theatrical release, suddenly everybody had an opinion. Somebody at the lot went, ‘Huh, these flashbacks are confusing! We should re-cut the whole movie so that it all plays in real time.’ And, we were like, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me. That’s going to kill the movie! That means Batman won’t show up until a half hour into the movie!’ That was horrible. Reluctantly, we did cut the movie that way and screened it for everybody on the lot and they looked at it and went, ‘Yeah, this doesn’t really work.’ So we were able to go back and put it back together the way it should have been. Yeah, it was tricky.”
Luckily the creative team behind the series managed to develop an incredible movie! They pulled off something special with this movie, and it tells one of the best Batman stories that’s been brought to life!
Radomski went on to say that they did the best they could but were never completely satisfied with the animation. He added: “No disrespect to the studio working on it. It was a last-minute effort to put it on the big screen, so there’s a lot of clumsy, ugly stuff in it, which the fans seemed to look past, which was awesome. It certainly made its money back, because we spent next to nothing on it.”
The movie cost $5.6 million to make and only earned $6 million at the box office. However, reviews were positive, with Siskel and Ebert even giving it a great review a year after it was released.
For more in-depth information on the history of Batman: The Animated Series, click here.