Zack Snyder Considered Casting Christian Bale in BATMAN V SUPERMAN
When Zack Snyder was looking to bring Batman back to the big screen after Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy had concluded, the plan was to keep the two different visions separate from each other. That wasn’t an easy sell for the studio, though. They wanted to find a way to try and cross Nolan’s universe over with Snyder’s, but we all know that would have never worked. But because Snyder was getting some pressure from the studio, he did actually consider casting Christian Bale in Batman v Superman, but not as the Dark Knight. It would have been some other, different kind of role. When talking to Film Ink about this, Snyder explained:
“This is a total and opposite reality from the Chris Nolan movies. It’s another universe, so we couldn’t hire Christian Bale if we wanted to, because he doesn’t exist in our world. Maybe we could hire him to play another part. We did talk about that briefly. I just wanted to hire Christian to play another part to make that obvious. Christian could play, like, Alfred with age makeup. No! Of course not. But you know what I mean. Even people at the studio would say, ‘Who are you getting from the other movies?’ And I was like, ‘Hey, come on guys, let’s all understand, it’s a different world.’ In the Batman universe that Chris Nolan created, Superman would have a hard time existing. That’s why we did a reboot on the universe, so we could allow these characters to exist together. We needed to do that to have Batman exist in this world.”
Casting Bale in any kind of role in Batman v Superman wouldn’t have worked at all as it would have been pretty damn distracting, so I’m happy that Snyder decided not to include him. It’s crazy to think how some of these studio executives lack common sense. If they planned on rebooting Batman and the DC franchise, why in the world would they want to include version of the characters from a completely separate movie universe? This must be the reason why a lot of movies turn out like crap.