“So, it makes me laugh a little bit.” While Returns has a skewed, playfully gothic, and often kinky sensibility, it’s far from the grounded grit of The Dark Knight movies or Reeves’ film, the latter of which Burton is yet to watch (“I’d like to see it,” he says).

“It is funny to see this now, because all these memories come back of, ‘It’s too dark’,” he says. This year, Matt Reeves’ hard-boiled noir The Batman proved there were darker depths to explore. In a major new Empire interview, Tim Burton revisited the film for its 30th anniversary, looking back on a movie that – at the time – was deemed as dark as Batman could get.

Perhaps no Bat-flick has exhibited this quite so distinctly as Batman Returns – Tim Burton’s go-for-broke sequel that followed up his 1989 blockbuster with lashings of latex, exploding penguins, and an oddball outlook that could only have come from the mind behind Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands.

Over the years the World’s Greatest Detective has been brought to the screen in various incarnations, from the campy ‘60s TV series to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, each version bearing clear signs of the filmmakers and eras from which they originated all while being unmistakably Batman. One reason why Batman continues to endure on screen is his adaptability.

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