21 Batman Movies That Almost Happened

17. The Batman

Eventually, Uslan decided simply to give up trying to ship the idea of a Batman film to other studios, formed BatFilm Productions and bought the rights themselves.

The next step was to commission James Bond and Superman writer Tony Mankiewicz to write the first official screenplay titled The Batman in 1983, tasking him to blend the poppy successes of Superman and the more realistic, darker elements of Bond.Mankiewicz relied heavily on Batman: Strange Apparitions, bringing in Rupert Thorne as a villain, as well as The Joker (in place of Hugo Strange) and love interest Silver St. Cloud and Robin - whose origin would be part of the plot. The rest of the cast would be made up of David Niven as Alfred, William Holden as Gordon, and best of all David Bowie as The Joker. Eddie Murphy and Michael J Fox were both suggested for Robin.

Fresh from the success of Ghostbusters, Ivan Reitman was attached as director, and expressed his desire to bring in Bill Murray with him to portray Batman, suggesting that the vision was creeping away somewhat from Uslan's darker desires.

The script was clearly never up to scratch, and unfortunately Reitman left the project in the midst of nine rewrites that reinvented the entire project. Joe Dante was briefly attached as his replacement, but the project was doomed to fail as soon as it started being extensively rewritten and it eventually died on its knees.