‘The Phantom’ on Hulu: ‘90s Movie Studios Learned All the Wrong Lessons from ‘Batman’

Superhero movies are everywhere in 2018. Ant-Man and the Wasp, Deadpool 2, Avengers: Infinity War, Black Panther, and we still have Aquaman coming later this year (that surprised you, didn’t it?)! Superhero movies were everywhere in 2008, too, with the release of Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Knight, Punisher: War Zone and more. But you won’t find the same omnipresence if you jump back another decade to 1998. Only one comic-based movie was released that year: Blade, the movie that slowly started to turn the then-maligned genre around.

Maligned? Yeah, pretty much. There are definitely fuddy duddy critics in 2018 that bemoan the nonstop hero movies, but that doesn’t seem to affect their Rotten Tomatoes scores and it definitely doesn’t impact their box office. But before Blade? Critics had every right to hate on those movies and audiences were wise to stick with movies that were mostly riffs on Die Hard. Superhero fans like myself had to settle for some reeeeeal super-dreck in the ’90s–and now you can rewatch one of those lost artifacts from the dreck decade on Hulu: The Phantom.

Let me set the stage for this movie, which features a pre-Titanic Billy Zane riding horses in a purple Party City getup. There was a moment at the end of the ’80s when it really felt like superhero movies were gonna happen. I remember seeing Tim Burton’s Batman in theaters in 1989. I was 5, so obviously I loved Batman the hero and I loved Batman the movie (even if I did not understand much of it). A year later, it really seemed like Batman had started the golden age of comic book movies. The surprisingly mature Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the flashy Dick Tracy both grossed over $100 million at the box office. The ’90s were finally going to get comic book movies and superhero movies right!

And then… choices were made. Movie studios took the wrong lessons from the back-to-back-to-back success of Batman, TMNT, and Dick Tracy. Instead of leaning into the superhero side of Batman and the freshness of the Turtles, movie studios leaned into the 1930s pulp hero side of Batman and his forebear Dick Tracy. Kids don’t want superheroes, they want… 70-year-old comic strip and radio serial crimefighters?

Crazy, right? That’s what they learned! Instead of fast-tracking James Cameron’s Spider-Man movie or responding to the small-screen mega-success of the X-Men cartoon, Hollywood decided that the kids of the ’80s and ’90s wanted to see their grandparents’ favorite crimefighters dusted off. Not even updated, mind you, because The Rocketeer, The Shadow, and The Phantom were all set in the decade before World War II. Kids’ll love it! They… did not!

Real talk: I will fully admit that it’s shady of me to lump The Rocketeer in with these other duds. The Rocketeer was created in the early ’80s as an homage to ’30s heroes, so he’s actually an indie comics contemporary of the Ninja Turtles. But still, his (pretty darn fantastic!) movie landed in theaters in June 1991 and did not do nearly as much business as Disney expected ($46.7 million domestically; yes, I saw it in theaters).

The Shadow is most notable for being one of the direct inspirations for Batman. Originally a radio serial character, he made the jump to comics in 1931–a full eight years before Batman debuted. Like Batman, the Shadow is a master detective and hand-to-hand combat expert. Unlike Batman, some iterations (like the movie) give the Shadow the power of invisibility and hypnosis. Not learning from the failure of The Rocketeer but perhaps emboldened by the success of Batman Returns in 1992, The Shadow drifted into theaters in 1994. But audiences were not interested in watching Alec Baldwin disappear into the role of their grandad’s second or third favorite sleuth. The Shadow only grossed $32 million domestically; I waited until it hit the shelves at Blockbuster.

But The Shadow’s failure didn’t really matter, because Batman Forever came out in 1995 and made even more money than Batman Returns. And once again, instead of focusing attention on literally any other actual superheroes (Green Lantern, The Flash, Wonder Woman, even another Superman!), Paramount greenlit… The Phantom. Yes, another period-piece 1930’s comic strip character punched his way onto the small screen as a reaction to Batman’s success.

The Phantom was an even bigger flop than The Shadow, only grossing $17.3 million dollars (!) when it thudded into theaters in June 1996. Rewatching it now (which you totally can on Hulu, remember??), you can see director Simon Wincer (Free Willy) and writer Jeffrey Boam (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) working hard to make this 1930s comic strip hero cool. His suit has a hip BodyGlove quality to it, like the Phantom catches waves and bad guys. He has a sassy, Lois Lane-ish love interest (Kristy Swanson), and a murder-happy bad guy (a mustachioed Treat Williams with the near-palindrome name Xander Drax). The Phantom leaps from planes and rides horses and pets tigers and, like the movie poster says, he slams evil! Whatever that means!

The Phantom is a bizarre movie. It’s a superhero movie where the best special effect is Billy Zane’s hairline. It features a standout performance from a pre-Zorro Catherine Zeta-Jones, perfectly cast as a femme fatale. It has gangsters and pirates and, at the end, f’ing Shang Tsung from Mortal Kombat shows up because this movie needed all the help it could get. And yep, I definitely dragged my dad to the theater for this one because it was the only game in town. I loved the X-Men, but I settled for the Phantom.

“People love pulp heroes of the ’30s” was a truly weird takeaway from the success of Batman and Dick Tracy (which, TBH, actually disappointed its studio for not making as much money as Batman did a year earlier). And a trend that I didn’t even talk about here, “People love edgy alternative comic characters,” was a truly weird takeaway from the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (box office duds like Tank Girl, Judge Dredd, and Barb Wire).

The time obviously wasn’t right for the Marvel heroes or the X-Men or any of DC’s non-Bat-themed crusaders. Even though most of them had been around for 30 or way more years by the time The Phantom came out, the old execs in charge were probably more comfortable with the serial heroes of their youth than the colorful superheroes they inspired. Plus, special effects weren’t really at the point where you could believably make Spidey web-swing or make the Hulk bigger than a bodybuilder in green makeup. Maybe all these pulp heroes came to life in the wake of Batman because we just weren’t ready for the true age of cinematic superheroes. 

And now that we live in that age, we can look back on a movie like The Phantom for what it is: a deeply weird movie made by a studio hungry to cash-in on a trend but totally unaware and/or unable to actually follow through. Also: a vehicle for Treat Williams’ fantastic mustache.

Watch The Phantom on Hulu