Yesterday most of us were stunned about the SPIDER-MAN reboot. So stunned in fact that another interesting piece of information passed right by us.
At one point, The Hughes Brothers were going to be behind the camera for “The Dark Knight Returns”. Frank Miller’s tale takes place ten years after the death of Jason Todd (the second Robin). Since the passing of his sidekick, Batman has been in retirement. However, Bruce is forced to come back as the Dark Knight when Harvey Dent returns to the life of a criminal, and that’s not even the bulk of it.
The Brothers explain, “Three different Batman projects were presented to us over the years. The first time, it was ‘The Dark Knight [Returns].’ I remember how dark the comic book was. Batman was old. He had to rely more on his tools and other shit, and he was a decrepit, 60- or 70-year-old man in this comic book.”
That wasn’t the best part of the news though. This was where they dropped the bomb, “I remember saying to them back then, ‘We want to do this, and you should get somebody like Clint Eastwood to do it'”. Can you imagine that shit? Really makes you wonder about the possibilities of that project.
The guys say that their film would have killed the franchise, but for a lot of people, Joel Schumacher was the one that murdered it. Basically, they just weren’t feeling it, “It was a different regime at the time at Warner Brothers, and they did offer it to us a couple times, but we were never going to do that. Nolan’s done a phenomenal job with Batman — especially the first one — and that’s what we would’ve done if we were interested, but we were never going to do a Batman or Superman movie. I know we couldn’t do that. After our first movie, we were getting offered everything, but we’re not capable of delivering a corporate project like that, it’s not in our blood.” It would be something seeing Eastwood as a bitter, old Batman chasing after Dent. Just another one for the book of what ifs.
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