5. Batman: Year One - Darren Aronofsky
Amidst the carnage wrought by neon-boy Schumacher's camp-fest, the woeful Batman and Robin, Warners was desperately doing some much needed soul searching related to how to best proceed with the highly lucrative Batman franchise. In their half-crazed search, the suits stumbled across New York filmmaker Aronofsky who, when pressed about how he would restart the franchise, gave them some lip about how he would shoot the film in Tokyo and cast Clint Eastwood in the leading role. Amazingly enough the suits were interested in the young filmmaker's sass, commissioning him to write a screenplay based around the prolific, character-defining storyline of Batman: Year One, by Frank Miller (of Sin City and Dark Knight Returns fame). The results were anything but ordinary. Aronofsky's screenplay dramatically reimagined not only Miller's original text but core elements of the Batman mythos itself. In the filmmaker's story, Wayne doesn't end up living in his family's comfy mansion until sporadically deciding to take his little world-wide joy ride. Following the murder of his parents, Bruce shacks up in a grimy auto repair shop run by a man named "Big Al" and his son "Little Al." There Bruce watches Gotham continue to deteriorate, becoming progressively more and more cynical until finally taking the streets like a caped variation on Travis Bickle. Aronofsky stated that:
The Batman franchise had just gone more and more back towards the TV show, so it became tongue-in-cheek, a grand farce, camp. I pitched the complete opposite, which was totally bring-it-back-to-the-streets raw, trying to set it in a kind of real reality no stages, no sets, shooting it all in inner cities across America, creating a very real feeling. My pitch was Death Wish or The French Connection meets Batman."
In the end we would wind up getting a film series that brought Batman back down to his core as a gritty avenger - with Batman Begins even incorporating many elements of Miller's Year One into its script. However, Aronofsky's promise to really jettison the Hollywood gloss and make something real and intimate is something that sounds remarkably cool, especially when one could make the argument that even Nolan gave into Hollywood after awhile, with his overly big and grandiloquent Dark Knight Rises .