How Tommy Wiseau’s The Room inspired The Batman

Last Updated on October 1, 2024

Oh, hi, Bruce! It’s pretty rare when a bad movie influences a filmmaker in a positive way. Maybe someone like Tim Burton is intrigued by the do-it-yourself style of Ed Wood and makes a brilliant biopic but most bad movies are examples of what not to do. Then again, not all are…Take cult flick The Room, for example. Sure, there’s James Franco’s The Disaster Artist to recount the making of Tommy Wiseau’s pet project, but The Room actually partly inspired an installment in one of the biggest franchises ever. That’s right, without The Room, the visual style of The Batman may not have been what it was.

As Miguel Santana da Silva – digital artist for Industrial Light & Magic who worked on The Batman – recently revealed, the matte paintings in some of The Room’s most infamous scenes were a direct inspiration for how Gotham would look in certain scenes. “Good opportunity to mention that when composing the look of Gotham in the sunset scene, I took a small amount of inspiration from the rooftop matte painting in The Room, which actually vibes so much harder than it has any right to.”

Tommy Wiseau even replied to the post, writing, “What a story”. And Wiseau knows a thing or two about The Batman, as he even participated in a Nerdist-commissioned audition tape at the time when Joaquin Phoenix was announced as the new Joker. He even donned the makeup once more to recreate the interrogation scene from The Dark Knight, with The Room co-star Greg Sestero standing in as Batman.

Wiseau continues to be a champion for The Room. While he has a different perspective on it than the eventual audience does, it must be cool for him to see a tribute of this level. Now I’ll have to rewatch The Batman to see if the production team hid any spoons in the frame…

The Batman would make $766 million worldwide while The Room took in about $58,000 in its initial 2003 run…although special screenings have bumped that number up.

Are you a fan of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room? Have you caught a midnight screening of the movie?