The Role: The Scarecrow Cast Instead: Cillian Murphy (Eventually) Unthinkably, but now infamously, Joel Schumacher was optioned to make a third Batman film, despite the fact that Batman & Robin was a travesty. To be fair to Warner Bros, they optioned the next sequel after seeing dailies (which must have all been cut out of the film, judging by the impossibly positive reaction to them) and not the finished product, so they can be partly forgiven for that. Anyway, there's quite a lot of information (and even more spurious conjecture) available online dedicated to Triumphant, and one of the most widely shared, and awfully intriguing is the fact that Nic Cage was set for a villain role, probably as The Scarecrow, alongside Madonna. Of course in the end, everyone realised how bad an idea Schumacher was, and the rug was pulled out from under his sequel idea, before Batman went into a quiet corner for a while, before Chris Nolan came in with a darker, more realistic tone, and reinvented the Bat. Why He Would Have Ruined It... Because he's Nicolas Cage. If that's good enough reason to fill the plot-holes in The Dark Knight Rises, it's good enough for me here. But seriously, like the Willy Wonka almost casting, the Scarecrow would have required something that just isn't in Cage's range - or at least not according to his past form. Had Schumacher made Batman Triumphant, there's very little suggestion that he would have gone with the restrained take on Dr Crane that Chris Nolan's writing team came up with, and we would probably have seen something more along the lines of Two Face/The Joker in different clothes (probably daubed in fluorescent paint.)
