Ask any comics fan what their biggest concerns about the future are, and you'll probably get a list that looks something like this:

1. Moving out of my parents' basement
2. Kissing a girl
3. The next Batman movie

And not necessarily in that order.

Movies about Batman get worse over time. The first one still kicks a pretty large chunk of ass; the second one is an underappreciated cult masterpiece; the third and fourth films blow. Some fans attempt to rationalize the third one; "sure, it's different," they'll say, "more of a sixties' pop camp version of the Caped Crusader, but it's pretty cool."

Wrongo, folks. It blows. So does Batman and Robin.

Here's how bad I thought Batman and Robin was. I saw it on opening night in a packed theater on a beautiful June evening, and I FELL ASLEEP. Back in 199something, I attended the midnight premiere of Dick Tracy where you had to buy a T-shirt as your "ticket" to get in, and I stayed awake while my dad snored away next to me. I NEVER fall asleep in movie theaters. But I slept happily through part of Batman and Robin, and even missed Coolio's cameo. Sucks to be me, or perhaps it doesn't, since I didn't have to sit through fifteen minutes of that shitfest.)

The weird thing is that Batman movies don't have to suck donkey balls. There is now over sixty years of fantastic source material to draw upon. Granted, some of that sucks donkey balls too, but some of it doesn't, and some of it is seminal pop fiction. Even if you picked a random issue of 1940s Batman and adapted it, it would probably be better than anything that a professional screenwriter in the 1990s has come up with. Even one of those wacky sci-fi Batman stories from the fifties where the Dark Knight is turned into a slimy alien would be better than the current directionless mess of the Batman film series.

Warner Bros.' failure to produce meaningful, powerful, epic Batman films is pathetic. It's uncalled for. So in case you're reading, WB execs, here's a few handy tips on what to do with the next Batman movie:

1) Return to the source material. This character hasn't survived sixty years of continuous publishing for no reason whatsoever. There has to be some secret to his success. Read old Batman comics, take copious notes, and bring what is on the page to the screen. Bob Kane, creator of Batman, personally consulted on the first Batman film, and I think his participation shows, because the movie retains the look and feel of classic Batman. That's what we want: classic Batman, not reworked crap that barely resembles the character.

2) Adapt. If you can't invent your own decent Batman story based on reading and re-reading the greatest Batman comics of the past half-century, then just steal the plot of one and use it. DC owns those stories, fer chrissake, and Warner Bros. owns DC. They belong to you. Take Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns or Year One, or Jim Starlin's "A Death in the Family," or anything that faithfully delivers a great Batman story. Swipe the plot, make a movie, madly count the money as it pours into your coffers.

3) Try variety. The Batman film series should be like the James Bond series. Every film is similar, every film is somehow slightly connected, yet they work as independent entertainments built around a classic central character. As an ongoing series of films rather than a set of rapidly-declining sequels, there's much more room for experimentation and variety.

You don't have to pour $150 million down an entertainment black hole and construct some horrific, bloated "blockbuster" to make a Batman movie. Give a young edgy filmmaker $20 million and points off the back end, and make them write a small, intense Batman film. Many of the best Batman comics stories have been built around the Dark Knight Detective tracking the scum of Gotham City with only his wits and his all-too-human strength--minus the Bat-boats, wacky supervillains and convoluted action sequences. Go the small route instead of the overblown one. A lean, mean Batman movie would return to the character's roots and deliver with intensity while saving you tons of cash.

Then do a big-budget Batman supervillain battle, and then pit the Dark Knight against the Gotham City mob in an Untouchables-esque story, then send him off to fight Ra's Al Ghul in a James Bond-esque adventure, then drop him in the jungles of Africa to hunt down an escaped serial killler...

The possibilities are endless. Explore them.

4) Get some new talent. Some of the best ideas I've yet heard regarding the live-action Batman film franchise have involved two names: Ben Affleck and Paul Dini. Affleck would make the perfect young Batman, attractive yet detached and brooding, passionate yet obsessed with his mission. Dini, who has served as the creative mastermind behind the exceptional animated Batman series of the past several years, was rumored to have been writing a live-action Batman script as well, but that script never made it to production.

These are two talents who would be tremendously well-suited to participating in the Batman film franchise. Why are they only rumors and not reality? If you insist on going cheap, hire ten young screenwriters with potential, pay them each $50,000 and demand a Batman movie script from each. See what happens. It's clear that people like Joel Schumacher and Akiva Goldsman will only succeed in driving the franchise further into the ground if they return to work on future Batman films. We need new blood. Batman needs new blood. The old blood is clotted and nasty.

5) Understand the character. Whatever you do, you MUST do this, because you've sucked at it for two Batman movies so far. Perhaps you suits are a bit too brain-dead to figure out exactly where Bruce Wayne is coming from, so let me try to break it down for you: he's Zorro with an Oedipal complex. He does not have to be psychotic; he does not have to be a closet vinyl fetishist. He just has to be a dark man with a crushed soul who is driven to hunt crime. How hard can that be? Again, I must say--it's worked for sixty years, why tamper with the formula with some whacked-out crap that comes from left field? The character doesn't need to be reinvented; he needs to be understood and interpreted properly. If you do nothing else, PLEASE try to do this, because to fail in understanding Batman is to insult one of the great fictional creations of our century. He's an icon. Try to figure out why.

6) Worst case scenario: make me the star. Cast Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman again. Let us have sex on camera. I guarantee big box office.