Seminal writer Frank Miller recently had a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, where a variety of comic and film related topics came up.
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Of those topics of interest was a project with Darren Aronofsky that never made it past the screenplay phase. When THR asked him about why it didn’t make it to production, Miller revealed it was too dark for Warner Bros. at the time. Here is his full comment.
It was the first time I worked on a Batman project with somebody whose vision of Batman was darker than mine. My Batman was too nice for him. We would argue about it, and I’d say, “Batman wouldn’t do that, he wouldn’t torture anybody,” and so on. We hashed out a screenplay, and we were wonderfully compensated, but then Warner Bros. read it and said, “We don’t want to make this movie.” The executive wanted to do a Batman he could take his kids to. And this wasn’t that. It didn’t have the toys in it. The Batmobile was just a tricked-out car. And Batman turned his back on his fortune to live a street life so he could know what people were going through. He built his own Batcave in an abandoned part of the subway. And he created Batman out of whole cloth to fight crime and a corrupt police force.
Ater hearing the full extent of their take on the character, it isn’t surprising it didn’t make it to film. The Nolan trilogy had a more mature and darker tone, but if you are saying that Frank Miller was the good cop in this scenario, then it’s pretty safe to say it might have gone too far.
This might make a great graphic novel, though, as THR suggested, so maybe we will get to see this version come to life on the page someday.
