Borrowing tactics from the Warner Bros. promotional campaign that had turned Tim Burton's Batman into a cultural touchstone the previous year, Disney had spent months priming audiences for the movie event of the year.
1990: Looking to manufacture an event movie experience in the vein of 1989’s juggernaut, “Batman,” Disney was fairly shameless when it came to pimping their latest summer blockbuster, “Dick Tracy.”
Disney, releasing the film through its Touchstone Pictures division, plainly saw Dick Tracy as their big film of the summer of 1990; it seems more than a little likely that they in fact meant for it to be their answer to the previous year's Batman , in fact.
"Tracy" is Tinseltown's annual celebration of everything that's wrong with itself: the hype, the agent-negotiated star system, the Hollywood "fun" assembly-line method of copy-cat mediocrity, etc. "Tracy" has carbon-copied almost everything from last year's "Batman" model: Beatty = Keaton, Pacino = Nicholson, Madonna = Basinger, moody/cartoonish scenery = moody/cartoonish scenery, pop Prince on the soundtrack = pop princess Madonna on same.
Like Michael Keaton in "Batman," Beatty plays it cool, allowing the many goofball characters around him ?