The Batman Beyond Movie That Almost Was…
We’ve been talking a lot recently about DC movies that nearly happened. There was Frank Miller’s canceled Justice League movie & a really terrible version of Batman v Superman that was nearly a thing. Now, there was even apparently a Batman Beyond movie that nearly happened 15 years ago.
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Director Boaz Yakin was riding high off the success of the football movie Remember The Titans and was very much in demand for another film at the time, but he felt after doing a big studio picture, he should do a smaller, independent movie. He jokingly told his agent :Well, if I’m going to do a studio movie, like, I want it to be Batman’ — which at the time I just meant, if I’m going to do a studio movie, I want it to be a big ol’ thing.”
Yakin’s agent took this quite literally:
"He came back to me and said, ‘I have a meeting set up for you at Warner Bros. about Batman.’ I was like, ‘What!? [Laughs] Okay. I guess at the time I think Darren Aronofsky was developing a Batman: Year One type of thing (that eventually became Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins) So I said, ‘Okay, let me see what I can do,’ and I came up with this pitch on Batman Beyond."
What was Yakin’s vision for Batman Beyond? He said “It was almost like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man but a little bit darker — a teenage, kind of futuristic, cyberpunk Batman thing.”
Yakin spent a few months on the proposed Batman Beyond movie, working with creators Paul Dini & Alan Burnett on a script, but felt the pressure of a superhero movie was apparently too much:
"[I] very quickly got the feeling that I would be in the zone, the madness, and I didn’t really have the heart for it at the time, and I basically bailed after one draft. I just went, ‘I can’t do this.’It might have really hurt my career. I went off and wrote the best script I ever wrote that never got made. But it was just one of those moments in time where you think you want to do something, and then you realize you don’t really want to do it, and for some reason it’s on your IMDb page for the rest of your life."
I would love to see a Batman Beyond movie sometime in the near future, I do think 15 years ago might’ve been a bad time to make it, I’m not sure the technology at the time would’ve been up to the task (at least with the budget they would’ve most likely been given).
h/t IGN
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