While promoting his new movie Max, filmmaker Boaz Yakin was asked about the unmade Batman Beyond live-action movie he worked on 15 years ago.
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Back in 2000, Yakin became a high commodity in Hollywood because he had directed Disney’s hit film Remember the Titans. After making a successful studio film Yakin wanted to pursue indie work, but he jokingly told his agent he would consider a studio project only if it was for Batman. Oddly enough, his agent took his comments literally.
“He came back to me and said, ‘I have a meeting set up for you at Warner Bros. about Batman.’ I was like, ‘What!? [Laughs] Okay,’” Yakin recalled to IGN. “I guess at the time I think Darren Aronofsky was developing a Batman: Year One type of thing.” (Year One, of course, would eventually go to Christopher Nolan, who turned it into Batman Begins.) “So I said, ‘Okay, let me see what I can do,’ and I came up with this pitch on Batman Beyond.”
Warner Bros. quickly hired Yakin to direct as well as co-write the script with Batman Beyond TV series’ creators, Paul Dini and Alan Burnett. What did they come up? “It was almost like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man but a little bit darker — a teenage, kind of futuristic, cyberpunk Batman thing,” Yakin said.
Yakin only worked on the project for a few months. After the first draft he had a change of heart and bailed. It simply came down to “one of those moments in time where you think you want to do something, and then you realize you don’t really want to do it.”
Would you like to see a live-action Batman Beyond movie?
