Darren Aronofsky Discusses His Joaquin Phoenix Batman Movie and Why It Didn't Get Made

Long before Joaquin Phoenix took on the role of Batman’s iconic villain the Joker, he was supposed to play Bruce Wayne/Batman in a Batman movie developed by director Darren Aronofsky. This was back in the early 2000s when Warner Bros. was looking to bring Batman back to the big screen. The filmmaker previously explained:

"I always wanted Joaquin Phoenix for Batman. 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."

So, while Aronofsky wanted to cast Phoenix, the studio had a very different vision, a vision where they wanted someone like Freddie Prinze Jr. playing the caped crusader! The director explained in an interview with Empire:

“The studio wanted Freddie Prinze Jr. and I wanted Joaquin Phoenix. 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.”

And that was the beginning of the end of this vision for a new Batman movie. It’s hard to imagine Prinze Jr. in the role of Batman, but at the time he was an in-demand, teen heartthrob actor. In a way, a lot of people felt that way when Robert Pattinson was cast. The different is, Pattinson is actually a great actor.

Aronofsky was initially looking to make an adaptation of Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One which would have been a dark take on the character. Miller was even helping write the script, and the movie would have included nods to Death Wish, The French Connection and Taxi Driver:

“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’s take on Batman ended up being super dark, though. It was much darker than what Miller was expecting, and when previously talking about it, Miller said:

“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. 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.”

Aronofsky just wanted to make something completely different than anything that had been done before with the character. He wanted to do the completely opposite of what was previously done. He said:

“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. That’s where my head went.”

Unfortunately, Warner Bros. didn’t jump on board Aronofsky’s vision and the project fell apart. However, the director did previously say that the Joker movie that was made was exactly his pitch for Batman to the studio:

"You know what, I think it's finally... I think we were basically, whatever it is, fifteen years too early.  Because I hear the way they’re talking about the Joker movie and that's exactly – that was my pitch.

"I was like: we're going to shoot in East Detroit and East New York.  We're not building Gotham. The Batmobile – I wanted to be a Lincoln Continental with two bus engines in it... With two bus engines, all duct taped together. It was the duct tape MacGyver Batman."

He also said that he believes other elements from his film pitch have already made it into films like Batman v Superman. He explains: 

“Some of my ideas got out there through other films. Like the ring with "BW", Bruce Wayne's ring making the scar was our idea and I think that was in Zack [Snyder's] or something. Which is fine, you write these ideas and they get out.

“We were all about reinventing it and trying to make it more Taxi Driver visceral. That was the whole pitch. But the toy people were like, 'Oh it can't be a Lincoln Continental, you have to make a Batmobile.'"

I would have loved to see this movie! But, in the end, we got Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, which I’m extremely happy with! But still, I would have liked to see Aronofsky’s vision brought to life.