At Warner they were convinced they had Batman for a while before ‘Batman & Robin’ (1997) hit theaters, but the failure at the box office of the Joel Schumacher-directed film led the studio to have to completely rethink its strategy. Eight years passed between that movie and ‘Batman Begins’, which was held on June 15 on 16th anniversary of its premiere.
A fifth or a reboot?
In fact, Warner had already hired before the premiere of ‘Batman and Robin’ to Mark Protosevich to write the script for a fifth installment that would once again have Schumacher behind the cameras. Scarecrow was even cast as the film’s central villain, toying with the idea that Nicolas Cage interpret it.
The film was to be titled ‘Batman Unchained’ and it was going to have a more serious approach than its predecessor. However, the crash of ‘Batman and Robin’ made Warner quickly discard that possibility – such as the idea of a Robin spin-off that he was also considering – and begin to consider other ideas.
One that came from outside was the proposal of Lee Shapiro and Stephen Wise to make a complete reboot in ‘Batman: DarNight’, where the Scarecrow would be responsible for the creation of a horrible creature known as Man-Bat, something that forces Batman out of his self-imposed exile. Many of those involved liked the idea, but the studio’s new development director eventually scrapped it.
Two parallel projects
That’s when Warner began to seriously consider two different projects that could have coexisted. On the one hand there was the live action movie of the series ‘Batman Beyond’ that was going to have a script by Paul Dini and Boaz Yakin Behind the cameras. However, the project stalled already in 2001 and the following year the series in question was canceled …
It was also a shame that the adaptation of ‘Batman: Year One’, the acclaimed comic by Frank Miller. Warner hired Darren aronofsky to direct it and Miller himself was going to participate in the script, but the studio did not like it. Neither did the subsequent rewritings by the Wachowskis or the very Joss Whedon.
Aronofsky recently confessed that he wanted Joaquin phoenix would have played Batman, while Warner wanted Freddie Prinze Jr.. Few times the concept of irreconcilable differences was better to understand that ‘Batman: Year One’ will finally come to nothing by 2002.
A first attempt at ‘Batman vs. Superman ‘
At the beginning of the century, Andrew Kevin Walker, a screenwriter quite popular in the late 90s for his work on films like ‘Seven’ or ‘Sleepy Hollow’ presented Warner with the idea to reunite Batman and Superman in a film. In it, the dark knight would come out of retirement after the recent death of his wife, while the man of steel would have recently divorced.
The script was ready for 2002 after being reviewed by Akiva Goldsman -responsible for the two Batman films directed by Schumacher- and Warner decided to go ahead with him, signing Wolfgang Petersen to take care of the staging and choosing Jude Law to become Batman Superman already Colin farrell What Superman Batman Filming was to begin in early 2003 and was expected to last about six months.
It was then that JJ Abrams submitted a new version of his script ‘Superman: Flyby’, a project that had been shelved by Warner after the idea presented by Walker, which encouraged the studio to focus on films starring both superheroes alone.
‘Catwoman’ to buy time
Warner hired Christopher Nolan in early 2003 to relaunch Batman on the big screen, but he needed a superhero movie to buy time for the return of the batman to rise to the occasion.
The result was to recover the idea of a spin-off of ‘Catwoman’, working at forced marches in the film starring Halle berry, a disaster both economically – it cost 100 million dollars and raised just over 80 – and artistic, but that could be released in the summer of 2004.
That gave Nolan time to calmly develop the idea he had for ‘Batman Begins’, which he summarized as follows coinciding with its premiere:
I wanted to try to do it in a more realistic way than anyone would have used in a superhero movie before. I talked about a lot of movies that I liked, especially the ‘Superman’ of 1978, which is the closest thing to what I proposed. Obviously some of it hasn’t stood the test of time, but it’s an epic movie with some realistic texture. I wanted to do the epic Batman that you hoped would have been made in 1979.
On June 15, 2005 ‘Batman Begins’ was released in the United States – it would still take two more days to arrive in Spain -, starting one of the best trilogies in the history of cinema.