When the trailer for last year's Joker was released, and fans were met with the idea of Joaquin Phoenix playing one of the most famous villains in history, you can imagine the surprise. Now, in the wake of Joker's success which earned Phoenix an Oscar, we wouldn't be able to imagine Phoenix in any other role, least of all the hero of the story.
It turns out Phoenix's connections to Batman started years ago, even before Christopher Nolan's intellectual trilogy featuring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger were even a thought. When Warner Bros. were thinking about the next reboot for Batman, they were considering Darren Aronofsky to direct none other than Phoenix as the next Batman.
As SlashFilm.com reports, Aronofsky, said he fought to get his own version of the Caped Crusader, beginning with casting his number one choice for the superhero, Phoenix. In the end Aronofsky's proposal hit the trash can because the production company wanted to go in another direction.
Aronofsky talked to Empire about how the movie got canned and said it was mainly because they wanted someone more "clean cut" to play The Dark Knight. The person in their minds that suited this description was actually Freddie Prinze Jr.
"The studio wanted Freddie Prinze Jr and I wanted Joaquin Phoenix," Aronofsky told Empire. "I remember thinking, 'Uh oh, we're making two different films here.' That's a true story. It was a different time. The Batman I wrote was definitely a way different type of take than they ended up making."
If you thought it was hard to imagine Phoenix as Batman, now that he's played the Joker, picturing Prinze as the famous superhero is even harder, especially during that time. There's no doubt that Prinze was reaching heartthrob status in the early 2000s. The actor mainly stuck to teen dramas like She's All That and I Know What You Did Last Summer, so it would have been interesting to see the actor take on a real action-packed thriller.
What's interesting is that Warner Bros. wanted to go in a different direction that Aronofsky wanted, but in actuality they might have been on the same page. When Aronofsky was turned down, Nolan was picked up, but they both wanted to make a Batman movie that was like never before. They just chose to adapt the same source material in different ways.
According to Empire, Aronofsky wanted to base his Batman movies more closely to Frank Miller's Batman: Year One, which Nolan also took elements from. However, Aronofsky wanted his movie to have elements of Death Wish, The French Connection and Taxi Driver all in there in some shape or form, combined with following the original source material as its back bone.
Aronofsky even wanted Miller himself to write the script. "It was an amazing thing because I was a big fan of his graphic novel work, so just getting to meet him was exciting back then," Aronofsky told Empire. But it turns out that even they didn't really work together, when forming the basis for the film. Miller was surprised at the level of darkness Aronofsky wanted in his adaptation.
“It was the first time I worked on a Batman project with somebody whose vision of Batman was darker than mine,” Miller told The Hollywood Reporter. “My Batman was too nice for him. I’d say, ‘Batman wouldn’t do that, he wouldn’t torture anybody.'”
"The Batman that was out before me was Batman & Robin, the famous one with the nipples on the Batsuit, so I was really trying to undermine that, and reinvent it," Aronofsky explained to Empire. "That's where my head went."
While Phoenix might not have been the best fit for the role, at least he'd been in action movies before and had just stepped off the Gladiator set around 2000. Maybe Aronofsky saw Phoenix in all that Roman armor and made him think Phoenix could rock the Batsuit (one without the nipples).
We'll never know how exactly dark Aronofsky wanted to take his Batman movie either, but at least Phoenix would have been better than Prinze. "I always wanted Joaquin Phoenix for Batman,” Aronofsky told Yahoo Movies a couple of years ago. "It’s funny, I think we were just sort of out of time with our idea. I understood that [with] comics, that there’s room for all different types of titles, but I think Hollywood at that time was still kind of in the Golden Age of comics, and they were still just doing the classic titles in classic ways."
In response to how dark the filmmaker wanted to make his movie, he told The Guardian, "It was a hard R-rated Batman. What I pitched them was Travis Bickle meets The French Connection — a real guy running around fighting crime. No super-powers, no villains, just corruption. For the Batmobile, I had him taking a bus engine and sticking it in a black Lincoln. Real low-tech geek stuff."
Now, Matt Reeves is taking on the next adaptation, again with a Batman none of us saw coming, as he has taken on Robert Pattinson for the role. Just like Nolan and Aronofsky, Reeves hopes to give fans a Batman they've never seen before, with an origin story we've equally had never seen. Either way Batman is the most coveted superhero to get to adapt in film, so we're here for anything that might pop up, good or bad, as long as there are no more nipple suits.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTErZ%2Bippeoe6S7zGihqJmhqravec%2Bhpp6mma16orjMqKqtZZyWu6Wxw2aZmqydlrtutMSrnKxlp53GbrXTZpuinJ6peqmtz6mcp2c%3D