12 Most Notorious Batman Urban Legends

3. Bill Murray Almost Played Batman

Verdict: True(ish).

As the Internet will tell you, Bill Murray was really close to being cast as Batman in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, which would surely have changed everything about the dark movie.

The truth is a little more complex. It wasn't Burton who would have cast Murray at all, and the film he could have starred in was mostly unrecognisable from Burton's final film. Instead, Murray was targeted by Ivan Reitman who also wanted to cast Eddie Murphy as Robin and who was attached to Tom Mankiewicz's The Batman (written in 1983), which would have initially been released in 1985.

It went through at least nine separate rewrites and eventually Burton was hired after the success of Pee Wee's Big Adventure in 1985, at which point he rejected Tom Mankiewicz's script as too campy. So there was no way he entertained the Murray link either.