12 Shocking Batman Movie Plans That Almost Happened

3. Joel Schumacher's Darker Plans

While Joel Schumacher is largely blamed for turning Batman into a circus act in Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, he was working under paymasters who wanted to suppress all darkness and make movies that appealed more to the lucrative family market.

That much is even more clear in hindsight, as Schumacher has revealed that he actually wanted to make much darker Batman movies. He wanted to make Year One, a version of The Dark Knight Returns and DarKnight (starring Man-Bat), all of which would have been significantly darker and more grown-up than what was made.

The shock here is that Schumacher had such dark plans and that he thought he could pull them off. After all, while he might have faced studio pressure, he was still responsible for some of the worst decisions in any Batman movies ever.

He's also talked about his desire to make an Arkham Asylum movie, but it remains to be seen whether he's just trying to appease fans who still blame him for everything that went wrong.