The bat costumes in Schumacher’s two Batman movies were widely snickered at in the 1990s. Many overreacted to the fake nipples on their exteriors and their pronounced codpieces, details that Schumacher defends. In his review of “Batman Forever,” Roger Ebert noticed the fetishization of the Batman costume, and posited that Batman likely wouldn’t be Batman if he didn’t get to wear the costume.
When it came time to make the “freeze” suits for “Batman & Robin,” though, it seems like the steam had run out. There wasn’t enough time to really make a new suit from the ground up, and the wardrobe department had to get clever. Luckily, they had some of the old “Batman Forever” suits laying around, and were able to refit and reshape them on the fly. In the case of O’Donnell, he could even wear his old costume again, just recolored. Booher-Ciarimboli recalled:
“When they morph into another suit, we only had about three weeks to produce those suits at the end of the movie. So, we went back and took some of the ones from the movie before and cast the silver pieces onto those suits and glued them on.”
If the freeze suits look a little bulkier than their “Forever” counterparts, know that it was because the costume designers were merely pasting new pieces of rubber onto the exteriors. Bulky, flashy, silver, and toyetic, it seems that Batman’s days of lurking in the shadows were long over.
