How so?
'Returns' wasn't a Batman movie. It was an eccentric Tim Burton movie that had Batman wandering around aimlessly in the background.
That would be fine if it had been marketed as an eccentric Tim Burton movie. And if there were half a dozen other decent Batman movies out there to choose from.
But in 1992 we didn't have any of that.
We had one good Batman movie. Then we waited 3 years for a sequel . . . and we got a disappointing franchise-killer.
Seriously. Weaker franchises have been killed by movies that weren't as far off the mark as 'Returns.' Superman got a pair of bad movies in the mid-1980s and Warner Bros didn't reboot it again for almost 20 years. They absolutely could have abandoned Batman for decades too. IMO the animated TV series single-handedly kept it alive (as a TV/movie franchise) in the 1990s. There was a 15-year span of crap movies between Tim Burton's good one and the start of the Nolan series.
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