Darren Aronofsky's BATMAN: YEAR ONE Movie Was Too Dark... Even For Frank Miller
The Dark Knight Returns writer says the Year One screenplay he worked on with Darren Aronofsky featured a ruthless, sadistic Batman that caused the studio to run for the hills. Click on for more...
Before Christopher Nolan reinvented the Dark Knight with Batman Begins, director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem For A Dream, The Wrestler) had planned to helm a loose big-screen adaptation of Frank Miller's Batman: Year One. The pair completed a screenplay but frequently butted heads about the iteration of the Caped Crusader each wanted to use.
Apparently Aronofsky's take was far too dark - even for the man credited with giving us the most ruthless, gritty Batman to date. Here's what Miller had to say about what ultimately led to the project being cancelled during an interview with THR.
“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.”
We've previously heard some very odd things about Aronofsky's depiction of the iconic DC character and where he hung his cape, and Miller confirms those "homeless Batman" stories.
“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.”
To be fair, this does sound quite interesting, and would probably make a great non-canon animated feature or one-off graphic novel - but something tells me audiences wouldn't respond very well if that was the Batman that greeted them up on the big screen. What do you guys think?