Batman Returns' Most Annoying Plot Hole Secretly Revealed Penguin's Genius
One of the more perplexing moments in Batman Returns was when The Penguin revealed that he somehow had the blueprints to the Batmobile, and while the film only implies an explanation, other material confirms how this happened. The Tim Burton version of Batman is notably more reclusive than most iterations of the Dark Knight, making the plans to his main vehicle falling into the worst possible hands even stranger. Danny DeVito's version of The Penguin hints at a potential explanation, and the Batman Returns script nearly explained this odd moment, but it’s the film’s novelization that provides the best explanation for it.
Batman’s main form of transportation, the Batmobile, appears throughout both of Tim Burton’s films. As The Penguin demonstrates for Catwoman in Batman Returns, he initially planned on detonating both Batman and his weapons-laden car in one fell swoop, which his acquisition of the Batmobile’s blueprints made possible. Rather than killing Batman, however, The Penguin has his gang members install a device that puts the car under his control, using it to run over civilians and further tarnish Batman’s reputation.
In Batman Returns, The Penguin tells Max Shreck that he’s made a habit of obtaining important or incriminating discarded documents (“you flush it, I flaunt it”), providing the closest thing the film has to an explanation for how Cobblepot obtained the Batmobile plans, but the film’s screenplay included a deleted scene with another explanation. Early on in the film, Batman leaves the Batmobile unshielded as he fights Penguin’s henchmen during an attack on Gotham Plaza. Several gang members would have examined and photographed the unprotected vehicle, allowing them to later draw up plans. The Batman Returns novelization reveals the canonical explanation, however, in which Penguin gets the plans from Max Shreck, who in turn used his money and influence to acquire them from an engineer of the vehicle.
Bruce Wayne and Alfred take the secrecy of Batman extremely seriously in the Burton universe (aside from Alfred bringing Vicki Vale into the Batcave), so it seems unlikely that they’d carelessly discard legible copies of the Batmobile’s plans for Penguin to obtain. Furthermore, it’s also unlikely that Penguin’s goons could draw up accurate blueprints of the vehicle and use them to sabotage it later by simply photographing it with its shields down. The explanation in the Batman Returns novelization makes the most sense, but it’s still at least somewhat dubious.
The origin of the Burton-universe Batmobile is never fully explored, but Bruce and Alfred’s maintenance and repairs on the vehicle later in the movie suggest that the two built the vehicle themselves, which fittingly demonstrates Wayne’s genius. Moreover, if another party made the initial designs and initially constructed the vehicle, Bruce Wayne would work to ensure that the information couldn’t be so easily bought or bribed out of their hands. The novel’s explanation, while perhaps not water-tight, does tie into the first draft of Batman Returns’ script.
Written by Sam Hamm, who wrote the original 1989 film’s script and went on to write the canonical Batman ’89 comics, intended Batman Returns (initially known as Batman 2) as a more direct sequel to the first film. In addition to keeping Vicki Vale in a major role and returning to locales from the 1989 movie, he also made a meta-joke about the Batman movies’ titanic marketing campaigns by having street vendors sell pieces of the destroyed Batwing as merchandise. The engineer who Max Shreck obtained the Batmobile plans from might have been tied to the growing popularity of Batman, claiming to have worked on the Batmobile but only having studied it for some time. This would coincide with the Batman Returns novelization’s explanation while aligning with Bruce Wayne’s maintenance of the Batmobile in the film.
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