If you're a big fan of Tim Burton's Batman movies, you'll likely be aware that a Catwoman spin-off starring Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle was planned after the success of Batman Returns, but never made it past the early stages of development.
We're not sure exactly how close the project came to becoming a reality, but it sounds like Warner Bros. fully intended to move forward with Catwoman... until uncertainly about how to approach a solo story focusing on The Dark Knight's feline foe led to the movie being scrapped.
While speaking at a recent Los Angeles screening of Batman Returns, screenwriter Daniel Waters revealed that his idea for the Catwoman spin-off was in stark contrast to Burton's.
“He wanted to do an $18 million black and white movie, like the original Cat People, of Selina just lowkey living in a small town,” Waters said. “And I wanted to make a ‘Batman’ movie where the metaphor was about ‘Batman.’ So I had her move to a Los Angeles version of Gotham City, and it’s run by three asshole superheroes. It was The Boys before The Boys. But he got exhausted reading my script.”
Waters also revealed that Batman Returns was originally going to be very different to the movie that ended up in theaters, with an early draft of the script making numerous meta digs at Burton's first film, which Waters was not a fan of.
According to IndieWire, the movie "was originally set to open on the Batman logo, which would pan out to reveal an in-universe merchandise store, with Batman making several references to exploitative merchandising during the film."
Star Michael Keaton shot down this idea, however: “[Michael] Keaton said, ‘This is very clever. Cut it,'” Waters recalled.
Returns is widely viewed as one of the best Batman movies today, but at the time, a lot of comic book fans took issue with how far its depictions of the main characters veered away from the source material.
“It was a weird assignment in that I didn’t need to please anyone but Tim Burton. Before the internet, you didn’t have to go before a tribunal and say what you were doing — it was just two guys in a room riffing. We didn’t know shit about Batman villains,” Waters said. “We didn’t really understand the whole comic book thing. I just found out DC Comics stands for Detective Comics."
“The whole thing about Batman Returns is we got attacked by Batman fans because they thought, ‘This is only the second Batman movie, what the f*ck are you doing? You’re already going off-road,” he continued. “Now there’s like 50 Batman movies, it’s like, ‘Hey. That was pretty interesting.'”
What do you make of these ideas for a Catwoman movie? Which one would you have preferred? Drop us a comment down below.