10 Planned Comic Book Movie Scenes We’ll Never Get To See

9. The Agony Of Death By Laughing

For all of the original Batman movie's darkness, it was almost even darker, thanks to a particularly grim scene that added a different note to the Joker's Smylex plot. In Sam Hamm's original script, The Joker uses it first on two models - the same ones who appear in Joker's commercial - in a photo session. As the photographer urges them to smile more, they begin to giggle, which then develops into laughter and then maniacal, unrestrained hysterics, to his initial annoyance. Then it becomes increasingly clear that something terrible is wrong, and his reaction shifts to outright horror as the girls die laughing, with the awful Joker-grin contorted across their faces. As originally intended, this would have been far more grim than the death of the news anchor in the final film, and would have added far more weight to the threat of Smylex, since the longer scene offered a chilling insight into the gas' real effects. Ultimately, it was chosen to sanitise the film by removing that sequence altogether from the script. It all smacks a little of Warners' concern that the film would alienate their (wrongly) identified demographic, especially as when Joel Schumacher tried to make a darker version of Batman Forever, he was rebuffed (as he was subsequently in his attempts to make The Dark Knight Returns, DarKnight and Year One). Schumacher himself had tried to make Two-Face a more fearsome character through darkness: the original version of Forever included an extra segment of the opening sequence, in which the Arkham doctor finds two dead guards along with the scrawled message "The Bat Must Die" in blood on the wall - a particularly Joker-esque thing to do. Clearly that wouldn't have sold many toys.