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Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Batman’ Movie Was Even Too Dark For Frank Miller

By Gregory Wakeman
Published on: 09:15 PST, Mar 6, 2016

We’re now just a few weeks away from the eighth Batman film in just under 30 years. But while Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy has roundly been praised as the pinnacle cinematic adventures that feature the Caped Crusader, it could have all been so different.

That’s because back in the early ’00s after Batman & Robin had been critically mauled and labelled as one of the worst films ever released, Requiem For A Dream, The Wrestler, and Noah director Darren Aronofsky was in cahoots with Warner Bros. about rebooting Batman.

Aronofsky’s plan was to adapt Frank Miller’s 1987 comic book arc Batman: Year One, and he even began to co-write the script with Frank Miller. In fact, around the time of its development, Aronofsky was quoted as saying, “Toss out everything you can imagine about Batman! Everything! We’re starting completely anew.”

Aronofsky even hired his regular collaborator Matthew Libatiquc as the film’s cinematographer, while he also approached Christian Bale about playing the role of Batman, which is obviously a part that the Welsh actor would go on to perform in Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises.

However, despite these plans, progression on Batman: Year One ultimately disintegrated. And by June 2002, Warner Bros. had confirmed that rather than moving ahead with Year One, they would now be working on Batman Vs. Superman instead, which was another adaptation that would ultimately fail to see the light of day.

But why did Batman: Year One, despite the prestigious talent involved and the dream to reboot the character, ultimately never happen? Well, Frank Miller himself has provided a little bit more information on why it never was released, and he’s admitted that Darren Aronofsky’s version of Batman was much darker and different to his.

Miller explained to The Hollywood Reporter, “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.”

Despite their issues, Frank Miller admitted that he and Darren Aronofsky did ultimately finish their screenplay for Batman Year One, but then, shortly after handing it into Warner Bros., the studio admitted that they wanted to make a more family friendly Batman film.

“We hashed out a screenplay, and we were wonderfully compensated,” Frank Miller admitted during the same interview. “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.”

Miller then went on to explain precisely how much darker and unique his version of Batman would have been, and he painted a picture that it would have been dank and decrepit.

“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,” Miller continued. “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.”

Ultimately, Christopher Nolan was tasked with rebooting the iconic DC character, something that he did with aplomb with Batman Begins in 2005. And, just over a decade after the character was rebooted, Ben Affleck will take the role of the Caped Crusader again in Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice, which is due to hit cinemas on March 25.

[Image via Warner Bros.]

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