Max Shreck (Batman Returns)
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Maximillian "Max" Shreck is a fictional character created for the 1992 film Batman Returns, portrayed by Christopher Walken. He was likely named after the famed actor Max Schreck.
[edit] In Batman Returns
Shreck was a corrupt businessman who owned a large department store in Gotham City. Although the department store was his claim to fame, his intended legacy was a proposed new power plant. Secretly, the power plant was actually a nefarious construction that would suck power from other resources and hoard it, thereby making Shreck the most powerful man in the city. To ensure his plan's success, however, he needed backing from Gotham's mayor; as the mayor adamantly opposed the plant's construction, Shreck set his sights on finding a new candidate whom he could control.
One night, Shreck was abducted by the Penguin and his Red Triangle Circus Gang, who had been collecting dirt on Shreck for several years; among other things, the Penguin knew Shreck had disposed of toxic waste in Gotham's sewers, and had murdered his business partner. The Penguin blackmailed Shreck into helping him integrate into the world above. Privately, the Penguin wanted an excuse to access Gotham's Hall of Records to get the names of every first born son in the city and kill them (in a sick scheme that the Penguin saw as revenge for his own parents throwing him in the sewer as a child). Shreck had private ambitions for the Penguin as well; he schemed to present the freakish criminal as a sympathetic public hero and back his run for mayor, thus installing a mayor who would allow him to build his power plant.
When Shreck returned to his office, he found his secretary, Selina Kyle, rummaging through his files. When Shreck realized that she had discovered the true purpose of his power plant, he pushed her out the window to the concrete below; Kyle survived, however, and became a criminal. Dubbing herself Catwoman, she dedicated her life to taking revenge on Shreck.
Shreck, the Penguin, and the Red Triangle Circus Gang staged an event at a speech by the Mayor where a Circus Gang member nabbed the Mayor's baby right from his wife's hands. The Circus Gang member escaped into the sewer, where the Penguin "attacked" him, retrieved the baby, and came to the surface with the child in his arms. This made the Penguin a public hero and, under the guise of finding his birth parents, he was granted exclusive access to the Hall of Records. Bruce Wayne, however, was suspicious of his true motives. Shreck used the Penguin's newfound popularity to get him to run for Mayor in a recall election.
Meanwhile, Catwoman was making waves in Gotham as the feminist alternative to Batman, sticking up for all the meek, helpless women in the city (as she once saw herself). Her main target was, of course, Shreck, and in an act of terrorism, blew up an entire floor of his department store. Shreck was too busy with the Penguin's campaign to become distracted with the Catwoman, but his political aspirations were trashed by the Penguin's fixation with killing Batman. Hijacking the Batmobile one evening, the Penguin took Batman for a wild ride through the streets of Gotham, cursing him and the entire city out on the Batmobile's television monitor as he tried to kill him. Batman escaped the death trap, but made off with the recording of the Penguin's anti-Gotham tirade. At a rally the next day, Bruce Wayne and his butler, Alfred Pennyworth, piped in the audio from the previous night. The crowd believed the Penguin to be saying those things in real-time, and started pelting him with rotten tomatoes. Shreck quietly escaped and abandoned his Penguin scheme. The Penguin's own scheme, however, was just beginning.
As the Circus Gang began abducting the first-born children of Gotham, Shreck held a holiday costume ball in his department store. Among the guests were Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle. She had shown up to kill Shreck, and as Bruce tried to talk her out of it, they both figured out their dual identities. Suddenly, the Penguin crashed the party, coming to personally escort first-born son Chip Shreck with him to the sewers. His father intervened and, in a rare display of humanity, begged the Penguin to take him instead. The Penguin, still angry over being used in Shreck's plan, accepted the offer and lowered his captive down on a giant yellow duck. Batman took off to rescue the children, while Catwoman prepared to go into the sewer and prepare for a final confrontation with Shreck.
Shreck escaped, but he was stopped and taken hostage by Catwoman. Batman, who had just defeated the Penguin, begged Kyle to relent from the brink from murder, and even tore off his mask as an offering of peace. Shreck shot her point blank four times, but she survived her wounds long enough to take Shreck with her; she stuck a taser in her mouth and kissed him, causing a huge electrical explosion. When the smoke cleared, Shreck had been electrocuted to death, but Kyle was nowhere to be found.
[edit] Behind the scenes
Max Shreck has never appeared in any other medium besides the comic book adaptation of Batman Returns. Shreck was also considered to appear in the Batman Returns-inspired Batman: The Animated Series, but the idea was scrapped and a new character, Roland Daggett, was created.
Reportedly, the character of Max Shreck was originally written to be Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent. The explosion at the end of the movie was only supposed to scar Dent, which would lead to his becoming the villain Two-Face and set up the third movie in the franchise, Batman Forever. In another early draft of the script, Shreck was going to be the Penguin's older brother.
