Batman Begins Writer David Goyer Turned Down Film Because He Didn’t Think It Would Get Made

Back when Batman Begins landed in theaters, it had been nearly a decade since the Caped Crusader had last graced the big screen in Batman and Robin, an adventure that was largely panned by critics for its embrace of a campy style over a compelling story. The tonal shift with Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins was so strong, in fact, that writer David S. Goyer initially passed on getting involved in the project, as he had assumed that his script was so far off from the last film that it would never get made. In that respect, he didn’t want to invest time in crafting a script that would ultimately be scrapped. Instead, the film entirely evolved what audiences would come to expect from the superhero genre and revived the Dark Knight in pop culture.

“I remember, in our first conversation, [Nolan] was very interested in doing a naturalistic take, which was the exact opposite of where we’d gotten to with the Joel Schumacher movies. That, in and of itself, was revolutionary, at the time,” Goyer shared with the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “He wanted an origin story, but in comic books, they depicted his parents being shot and then, I think in the comic books, Bruce Wayne is in a study and the bat flies through the window and then he’s just Batman. In the comics, and even in the movies, they just kind of [skipped] over all of it, so he was really interested in exploring that.”

He continued, “Batman: Year One had come out, with Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli … but even Batman: Year One, Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham after having been gone for a year or two and we just don’t know what happened. So he was interested in exploring that period so that was really interesting to me. We had an initial conversation, and he asked me some thoughts, we talked about it for an hour, and I had a bunch of ideas and said, ‘I don’t want to do it,’ which is amazing, in hindsight.”

In addition to knowing his own vision for the hero was so different from the last film, Goyer also personally knew other filmmakers who spent the time to develop Batman scripts that were ultimately abandoned and was apprehensive about following suit.

“The main reason I felt I didn’t want to do it was because I didn’t believe it would get made. I had had three or four friends that had written Batman scripts that hadn’t been made,” Goyer expressed. “Boaz Yakin had done a Batman Beyond, Andrew Kevin Walker did a Batman/Superman, and I think Mark Protosevich, another friend of mine, had done another Batman. I knew at least four or five people that had written Batman movies that weren’t getting made and I just thought, ‘They’re just never going to do it. They’re never going to take a big swing and do something different.’ And Chris went away and then he came back, I don’t know, maybe three weeks later and he said that he’d met with a bunch of people and that my take, I don’t know if it was take — [our] conversation that was the only thing that really resonated with him and would I reconsider and meet with him.”

The collaboration between Goyer and Nolan proved to be exactly what audiences were looking for, as The Dark Knight trilogy would go on to take in a total of $2.5 billion worldwide.

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