Holy Flashback, Batman! Movies that Never Were

Producer Michael Uslan is well known as the man who erased the image of Batman ’66 from audiences minds (back when they tried desperately to run away from it) and brought the Caped Crusader back to the big screen.

Uslan hired Tim Burton to create Batman ’89, but that film went through many incarnations that were never realized, starting 10 years earlier. Over the summer, while plugging his memoir The Boy Who Loved Batman, the producer discussed some of the other projects that never got off the ground.

"Well, it started out where, when we got the rights in ’79, the only real big action franchise was James Bond, and we were using Bond as the model for what could be. So the first writer and director that we approached were my favorite Bond writer and Bond director, Richard Maibaum and Guy Hamilton…That was in 1980, and the writer became Tom Mankiewicz. Tom was considered the top script doctor in the business for these kinds of movies. It was Tom who rewrote Superman, it was Tom who did a couple really good Bond films, Diamonds Are Forever was one of them… And he was terrific. I loved working with Tom, he really understood it and got it. The approach was a serious Batman, but it was very much in the style of Bond… it wasn’t yet something that could be completely, totally, out-of-the-box breakthrough – that aspect of it wasn’t something that happened until Tim Burton became involved in the project.…I remember for about two minutes, Richard Rush was going to be attached as director – they had set up a screening for us of his movie The Stunt Man, for our opinion as to what he was doing. For about two years, I think, we were waiting for Ivan Reitman – he had gone off to do Ghostbusters before he’d come back to do Batman, but that didn’t work out ultimately. A wonderful guy who I’d known for years, Joe Dante, was in for… I wanna say, about a year… that was following his success at Warner Bros. with Gremlins, but then he left us to do a movie called The Explorers at Paramount. So there were many different potential iterations.You could really do an alternate universe book dealing with all of this stuff!"

Can you imagine Batman with Ivan Reitman or Joe Dante? That would have been a horse of a different color. Hell, even Batman ’89 almost cast Pierce Brosnan as Batman and Robin Williams as The Joker. It took a long and winding road to get where we did.