Current: Chip Shreck Former: Max Shreck & Fred Atkins
Featured in
Batman Returns (1992)
Shreck's (aka the Shreck Corporation) is a successful and highly influential conglomerate headquartered in the grim metropolis of Gotham City where it oversees many unique enterprises. It is prominently featured in the 1992 film Batman Returns.
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Staff[]
Founders[]
Max Shreck[]
“One can never have too much power. If my life has a meaning, that's the meaning.”
―Max Shreck
Max Shreck was the late founder and president of Shreck's and a ruthless business mogul who used his wealth to manipulate Gotham City.
Fred Atkins[]
Fred Atkins was the co-founder of Shreck's and former business partner to Max Shreck prior to his rather untimely "extended vacation", courtesy of his partner Max Shreck himself.
CEO[]
Chip Shreck is the chief executive officer of Shreck's and the son and heir of Max Shreck himself, having seemingly inherited his father's enterprise following his shocking death.
“If there were such documents... that's not an admission. I would've seen to it they were shredded.”
―Max Shreck when confronted about his questionable properties within Gotham City
As revealed through the Penguin's research of Max Shreck's past in his attempts to blackmail him, he discovered that Shreck secretly owned half the buildings in Gotham City that were no longer up to modern building and safety codes, making them literal firetraps, a fact which Shreck desperately tried to conceal, having even shred the documents proving this in the past, but even these shredded documents were recovered and taped back together by the Penguin and used to blackmail Shreck alongside other incriminating pieces of evidence.
Appearances[]
Batman Arkham City
Batman Arkham Knight - Catwoman’s Revenge
Batman Returns
Batman Returns (Novelization) by Craig Shaw Gardner
Batman Returns (Comic)
Batman Returns (Video Game)
Batman: Arkham City
Batman Arkham Knight - Catwoman's Revenge
Trivia[]
Shreck's in the Batman Returns comic
Shreck's is seemingly a dark parody or a stand-in for the Macy's Department Store in New York, much like how Gotham itself is a comic book stand-in for New York.
Tim Burton named Max Shreck after the real life German actor Max Schreck, who played the famous vampire Count Orlok in the 1922 horror film Nosferatu.
The second draft of the film revealed that Shreck was originally the second son (or "golden boy") of the Cobblepot family and by extension the Penguin's long lost younger brother and an heir to the Cobblepot fortune, with Shreck eventually revealing that he forsook the Cobblepot name out of shame for what his parents had done to his older brother. Although this plotline was seemingly abandoned for the final cut of the film, the Penguin still alludes to the possibility that he might not be an only child and mentions how he was not his parents' "golden boy".
In the first draft of the film though, Max Shreck and his company did not exist, with Harvey Dent (aka Two-Face) having originally been intended to fill Shreck's role in the film.
According to the film's DVD commentary with Tim Burton, the design of the company's mascot was seemingly inspired by Felix the Cat and was a jab at how large and corrupt corporations tended to adopt cute animal mascots to hide their true nature, liking it to Mickey Mouse, with the commentary further adding that Shreck's cat was also meant to tie-in with the characters' recurring Bat, Cat and Penguin animal motifs in the film, a fitting design choice for Catwoman's workplace.
Initially many fans had assumed the head was based on that of the Cheshire Cat, and even the game Arkham City has the Shreck signs used by the Batman villain, the Mad Hatter.
This section is incomplete. 
