10 Actors Who Confirmed They Were Almost Batman

7. Joaquin Phoenix - Batman: Year One

Joaquin Phoenix in Joker
Warner Bros.

Unlike the actors in the previous entries, Joaquin Phoenix lost out on playing Batman in a movie that was never actually made.

After the failure of Batman & Robin in 1997, Batman's big screen adventures went quiet while Warner Bros. figured out what to do with the character next. Eventually, they settled on Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins - more on that later - but at one point, they were considering letting Darren Aronofsky make a movie based on acclaimed comic-book story arc Batman: Year One.

And if this movie had gone ahead, Aronofsky wanted Joaquin Phoenix to be his Batman. Yep - the same Joaquin Phoenix who just won an Oscar for playing the Joker.

Unfortunately, the project fell apart when Aronofsky realized that the studio didn't share his vision, because, as we recently learned, they wanted someone completely different to play the title role...

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!