Acclaimed Director Admits to Not Taking Batman Movie Seriously (& Reveals Surprising Casting)

In the world of superhero movies, the projects that don’t get made are often just as legendary as the ones that do, and Darren Aronofsky‘s Batman movie is no exception. Back in 2000, as his career was just taking off, Warner Bros. hired Aronofsky to write and direct a Batman movie that sounds fascinating to fans, despite the fact that it never went past pre-production. Aronofsky has answered questions about this project for over two decades now, but on Monday while promoting his new movie Caught Stealing, he admitted that he never expected the film to be made. Aronofsky even admitted that he only took the job so that the studio would finance his own movie, The Fountain, which wound up a commercial flop and a mixed success with audiences and critics.

Aronofsky was in his late 20s when he released his debut feature film Pi, followed closely by his acclaimed psychological drama Requiem for a Dream. The back-to-back successes made Aronofsky a hot commodity in Hollywood. In their interview on Monday, podcaster Josh Horowitz suggested that this was when Aronofsky began receiving offers to make “popcorn movies.”

“That’s when Batman showed up, but I wasn’t — I was really focused on The Fountain. I really never took that seriously. I wanted to make The Fountain, that was where I was at.” Asked if it was true he had worked with comic book legend Frank Miller on that project, Aronofsky said, “We co-wrote a script, but my whole strategy on that one was, I wanted to make this totally wild, crazy film about love and the search for the fountain of youth, and I felt like if I was on Batman, they might let me make it, which is kind of what happened, sort of.”

Darren Aronofsky Reveals More of His Batman Movie Pitch

Even if all of his focus had been on Batman, Aronofsky doubts that Warner Bros. would have moved forward with the work he was doing with Miller. He said, “The Batman that me and Frank pitched — or wrote — was a really down and dirty, duct tape-type of movie. It wasn’t going to be selling Batmobiles, you know? I don’t think I was the right guy at the time. It was rated R. I think a whole world of superhero films had to first come out to scrape the bottom of that barrel before they would go to rated R films, like some of the later ones.”

Aronofsky and Miller’s script was an adaptation of Miller’s graphic novel Batman: Year One, and would have served as a reboot of the Batman film franchise, while Warner Bros. was still hoping for another sequel to fall in line with the four movies that came before it. The studio also had different casting ideas than Aronofsky. He recalled, “Famously, I pitched Joaquin and they were into Freddie Prinze Jr., so it was a very different world back then, aesthetically, what was going on.”

Aronofsky seems to have finally made his “down and dirty, duct tape-type of movie” in Caught Stealing, the new crime thriller he is currently promoting. It hits theaters on Friday, August 29th. Do you think the world missed out on Aronofsky’s Batman movie? Let us know in the comments down below.