True Story Of The Best Batman Movies Never Made

4. Aronofsky - The Dark Knight Returns And Year One

Before he left the franchise, Schumacher had one more ace up his sleeve. He pitched a take on Frank Miller's darker, seminal work Year One. His film - which sounds a little like Batman Begins - would see Bruce Wayne travelling the world and then returning to Gotham and becoming the dark knight.

Batman fans may give him a lot of grief, but modern Batman fans do owe Schumacher the idea to concentrate on Year One, as it persisted until Batman Begins came about in 2004. And Warner Bros were obviously taken with it, to the point that they ran with it for years.

The first director hired was Darren Aronofsky, who initially pitched the idea of The Dark Knight Returns - again with Clint Eastwood starring - as a means to get his foot in the door. When he was in, he went about putting his stamp on Year One, which had been green-lit by the studio already. He hired Aaron Eckhart as Jim Gordon and set about finding his Batman by auditioning a number of actors, including both Ben Affleck and Cristian Bale.

Aronofsky's take ended up being too controversial and provocative, naturally. Bruce Wayne would have been an orphan on the streets, taken in by Alfred surrogate, Big Al, who ran an autoshop with his son, Little Al. It would have taken a lead from Taxi Driver, with Wayne driven to fight crime to protect his city from itself in a tank, while Gordon was to be a hard-nosed cop and Selina Kyle a prostitute. Weird didn't sell for long, though and Warner Bros rejected the script - written with Frank Miller - and eventually moved on from Aronofsky too.