What Tim Burton’s Batman Forever Would Have Looked Like

6. An Origin Story?

Though it might seem like informed hindsight thanks to the success of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, Michael Keaton claims that that model was what he had hoped for from his final collaboration with Tim Burton. He revealed as much on the WTF podcast with Marc Maron:

The guy who’s doing them now, Chris Nolan, he’s so talented, it’s crazy…You look at where he went, which is exactly what I wanted to do when I was having meetings about the third one. I said you want to see how this guy started. We’ve got a chance here to fix whatever we kind of maybe went off. This could be brilliant.

It sounds very much like Keaton was advocating for this story when Warner Bros were actively wondering what to do with the story after they'd begun to realise that Burton's vision was too dark, but it ultimately fell on deaf ears. Which is a shame, because seeing a Year One style story with Burton and Keaton still involved would have been amazing,.