One of the best of the worst movies ever made to rake over the coals continues to be Batman and Robin. With some solid star power behind it, a very large budget for 1997 and generally some goodwill left over after Batman Forever from 1995, things just go wrong from start to finish here for oh so many reasons. Yet it’s interesting to check out some of the careers from there, as Clooney went on to be even more famous and well regarded and the films writer, Akiva Goldsman, churned out a few crappers after that but ended up grabbing an Academy Award for his adaptation of A Beautiful Mind. To be fair, he did write a lot of crap after that as well (Hello, Constantine). With a number of years behind it now, George Clooney has opened up a bit about it in an interview where he said:

It was a difficult film to be good in. With hindsight it’s easy to look back at this and go ‘Woah, that was really shit and I was really bad in it.’ The truth is, my phone rang, and the head of Warner Bros said ‘Come into my office, you are going to play Batman in a Batman film’ and I said ‘Yeah!’ I called my friends and they screamed and I screamed and we couldn’t believe it!”

It’s not hard to understand the enthusiasm, though surely once the script came in and the pieces started coming together, you have to cringe. And as others have noted, it’s the role where Clooney is more Clooney than the character he’s playing, so that has to have factored into it as well.

“I just thought the last one had been successful so I thought I was just going to be in a big successful franchise movie. In a weird way I was. Batman is still the biggest break I ever had and it completely changed my career, even if it was weak and I was weak in it. It was a difficult film to be good in. I don’t know what I could have done differently. But if I am going to be Batman in the film Batman & Robin, I can’t say it didn’t work and then not take some of the blame for that.”

[Source: Total Film ]