Frank Miller Thought Darren Aronofsky’s Unmade ‘Batman: Year One’ Film Was Too Dark

Prior to Christopher Nolan coming on board to breathe life back into the Batman franchise with his Dark Knight Trilogy, director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem For A Dream, Black Swan) was going to take a crack at the next big screen outing for the superhero and worked on a screenplay for a film with writer Frank Miller. The director had planned a loose adaptation of Miller’s Batman: Year One for the big screen but it seems that his vision was too dark even for Miller. And that’s definitely saying something coming from the man behind The Dark Knight Returns.

While speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Miller commented on cancelled project and his issues with Aronofsky’s incarnation of The Capsed Crusader.

“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.”

It seems that the director definitely had a “unique vision” for the project and this would be  much different version of Batman than we’ve seen on the big screen before. Miller revealed some of the differences that were featured in the unmade project’s script.

“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.”

Sounds like an interesting take on the character that I’d have been into seeing but definitely does not sound like something that the more hardcore “stick to the source material” fans would have been pleased with. Actually, I don’t even think the general audience could have fully gotten in to this one. Would you have like to seen Aronofsky’s vision on the big screen? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Source: THR