There was a time when Black Swan and Noah director Darren Aronofsky was developing a Batman: Year One movie for Warner Bros., but the studio weren’t keen on the direction he was taking the character in and later decided to reboot the franchise with Christopher Nolan years later. Now, legendary comic book writer Frank Miller has shed some light on why.
It turns out that the filmmaker was taking the Caped Crusader in far too dark a direction, and the grounded tone wasn’t what the studio were looking for (because of toys, obviously).
“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.”
While this take on the character would have been a lot of fun to see, it’s easy to imagine that Araonofsky’s interpretation of the Dark Knight’s story would have left fans cold. Also, the success of The Dark Knight Trilogy arguably prove that Nolan had a much better handle on grounding the hero while also staying true to the source material, thereby pleasing everyone.
The next version of the DC Comics icon will of course be played by Ben Affleck, and we’ll see him in action for the first time when Zack Snyder’s Dawn of Justice is released this month…
