By all accounts, The Batman will be a dark, dark movie. Taking its visual cues from Seven, and featuring a protagonist who has a breakdown and finds himself lured into intractable ethical murk by the suffocating power of vengeance, all signs point to the film being three hours of grot and depression and anguish.
But wait, have you tried the new The Batman Oreos yet? They’re absolutely bat-licious!
You have probably noticed by now, but The Batman is now suffering through one of the weirdest marketing campaigns in recent memory. Here is a film that very clearly views itself as a profound piece of art, drenched in mature themes of violence and alienation. Since Christopher Nolan took the reins almost 20 years ago, Batman has become a near mythical piece of our culture, and The Batman has designs to be the clearest expression of this yet. And there is credible artistic precedent here too. Increasingly, if you make a movie based in the world of Batman, you can expect to win an Oscar. This film is going to be a Serious Piece of Cinema.
And yet for some reason its marketing campaign is treating it like Sonic the Hedgehog. Right now, there is no product on Earth that The Batman won’t hitch itself to for a quick buck. The latest of these, according to a press release I received this morning, is the Ring video doorbell. In partnership with Warner Bros, Ring users can now download special Batman replies. This means that, should a stranger visit your house when you’re out, they’ll be greeted with a blast of Michael Giacchino’s doomy The Batman theme, accompanied by a cheery voice exclaiming: “Hello neighbour, looks like we missed your bat signal! Please leave a message!”
And that’s just for starters. A couple of Saturdays ago, I took my kids to see Sing 2, which was preceded by five separate adverts for a new, Batman-inspired Nissan Juke. And what is so intrinsically Batman-y about this particular Nissan Juke? It has a bit of yellow under the headlights. Apparently that’s enough.
Then there is all the food. The Oreos we have covered; they have a picture of Batman’s face on them, because we all know that nothing is more delicious than wolfing down an effigy of agonising mental torment. Papa John’s is also in on the act. Its pizzas currently come in commemorative The Batman boxes (because who doesn’t love using used food receptacles as keepsakes?) and there is also a new side – black ghost chilli chicken wings – that also apparently have something to do with Batman. Meanwhile, in the US, Little Caesars has made a “calzony” (a kind of folded pizza) that’s shaped like the Batman logo, allowing customers to grab themselves a slice of gooey, unresolved trauma.
Caffè Nero has subverted the pattern a little by focusing on the Riddler. It has launched a new hot chocolate, with a mysterious new flavour. If you can guess the flavour – which is to say, if you can stomach spending your money on a product that for the purposes of suspension of disbelief was designed by a nightmarish BDSM goblin – you can win a trip to a theme park.
Again, I’m barely touching the sides here. Carhartt has made The Batman coats. Lanvin has made an entire The Batman clothing line, as have Puma and EleVen by Venus Williams. Several brands are making The Batman wristwatches. There are The Batman candles, lipsticks, perfumes, nail polishes and soaps. It’s endless.
In fact, the last time I can remember anything like this barrage of promotional tie-ins was when the Sex and the City movie was released in 2008. Back then, the tsunami of official brand partnerships was so towering that the film’s own studio labelled the film “the Super Bowl for women”. But that made some amount of sense. Sex and the City was, at heart, a story about material consumption. There was an element of form and function to the campaign. The Batman, though, is a long, bleak film – in part inspired by the suicide of Kurt Cobain – about inescapable spiritual corruption. Nothing about it makes you want to go out and blow your wages on biscuits.
If you squint hard enough, you can understand why this promotional onslaught is happening. Post-Covid, there is now no such thing as a box-office sure thing. Film after film has foundered in recent months, as audiences have chosen to stay away and wait for a home release. Slathering Batman’s image over every conceivable product is a sensible enough way to ensure that people will know the film exists. But, at the same time, unless sales of Nissan Jukes absolutely soar in the next few weeks, perhaps it’s all a little too much.
