Over a decade before Zack Snyder enlisted Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill to do battle in Batman V Superman, Warner Bros. was working on a very different film featuring the iconic DC heroes which sounds like it would have turned out even darker than Dawn of Justice.
The movie was going to star Colin Farrell as The Dark Knight and Jude Law as the Man of Steel, with Wolfgang Peterson in the director's chair. We have heard a few vague details on this now cancelled (obviously) project over the years, but Akiva Goldsman - who took over as screenwriter when Se7en scribe when Andrew Kevin Walker exited the project - has now shared more info on his script, and he says it would have been "the darkest thing you've ever seen."
“I wrote on […] this version of Batman v Superman [around 2001 or 2002 when Colin Farrell was cast as Batman and Jude Law was cast as Superman and Wolfgang Petersen was directing," Goldman revealed during an in-depth chat with Collider. "We were in prep and it was the darkest thing you’ve ever seen. It started with Alfred’s funeral and Bruce has fallen in love and renounced being Batman, the Joker kills his wife, and then you discover it was all a lie. Just that the love itself was constructed by the Joker to break [Bruce]. It was a time where you would be able to get these sort of stories together in script form but they couldn’t quite land in the world. Somehow, the expectations of the object — whether they be audience or corporate or directorial — it wasn’t landing quite in the way I think we imagined when we put them on the page.”
Well, that certainly sounds... different! Goldsman went on to compare his take on the story to the Golden Age World's Finest comics, and it sounds like he was very happy with the script.
"It was really The World’s Finest, in a kind of dark and interesting way. I think it could have been lovely. On the other hand, none of me is sad that Nic Cage’s Superman didn’t get made. So, I guess in that whole period of time, there were wins to be had and losses to be avoided."
The major alternations to the source material may have alienated some fans, but this definitely could have been interesting. What do you guys think? Does this sound better than the movie we ended up with, or a whole lot worse? Let us know in the comments.
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