10 Pitched Movies Hollywood Wasn't Ready For

4. Darren Aronofsky's Gritty, Revisionist Batman: Year One

After Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin cratered critically and commercially, Darren Aronofsky was hired in 2000 to write and direct a loose adaptation of Frank Miller's much-loved origin comic Batman: Year One, with Miller being brought aboard to co-write the script.

Aronofsky's goal was to create a gritty superhero movie in the vein of Death Wish or The French Connection, throwing out many of the comic's conventions in favour of a new story which nevertheless retained the same basic themes.

For example, Alfred was now a black working class mechanic called "Big Al," which alone was probably enough to make Warner Bros. balk.

Yet according to Miller himself, the project stalled because he and Aronofsky disagreed on the tone of the material, with Aronofsky wanting to go darker than even Miller was comfortable with.

Several years later, Warner Bros. finally settled on Christopher Nolan's grounded take on a Batman origin story, Batman Begins, which itself drew many visual and thematic influences from the Year One comic.

Though such a radical departure from typical conceptions of Batman was unthinkable in 2000, in a present where a Justice League movie is about to be outgrossed by a gritty, R-rated Joker origin story, does Aronofsky's Year One really seem that out-there?