Batman: Year One: did Darren Aronofsky's unmade Dark Knight noir show us the future of superhero movies?

One of the times when it didn’t was 1997. Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin had under-performed commercially, and audiences were embarking on 20 years and counting of hatred for “Bat-Nipples” and ice-related puns. The off-kilter (yet still serious) Batman brought to life by Tim Burton in 1989 had relapsed into self-parody, a misunderstanding of the character that seemed out of date and had squandered moviegoers’ goodwill. As Adam West’s incarnation had shown, Batman could be in on the joke, but in 1997 people were just laughing at him.

Despite Batman & Robin’s failure, Warner Bros knew that it wouldn’t mean the end of the character entirely. Just a few years earlier, the Batman animated series had concluded with acclaim. It had successfully taken some of the wackier elements from the source material and coupled them with a brooding atmosphere.

All the film franchise needed was a similar contemporary feel, and a dedicated guiding hand. Ultimately, this happened, in the form of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Even with an embrace of realism, larger-than-life villains like the Scarecrow and the Joker could still be depicted with a good degree of faithfulness to their original incarnations.

Nolan, however, was not the first director who sought to drain Batman of its more fantastical elements. Schumacher himself wanted to try this to regain credibility, but Warner were looking for a new director; one of the filmmakers they got into talks with was Darren Aronofsky. To their tastes, his vision for Gotham City took it in a grounded direction. The only problem (with a lot of manifestations) was it was too grounded.

Aronofsky’s debut film, Pi, had only come out in 1998 and unlike now, the single independent film-to-blockbuster career path was more or less untrodden. Aronofsky had, however, been collaborating with Frank Miller, the celebrated comic book writer and artist. The two had been attempting to adapt Miller’s creation Ronin (which remains unmade), but Aronofsky was also keen to adapt something from the writer's Batman work, which coincided with Warner Bros’ franchise soul-searching. Miller was most famous for writing The Dark Knight Returns, and while Aronofsky liked it, he was more taken by another of his stories, Batman: Year One.  

Like The Dark Knight Returns, the work is hard-bitten and iconoclastic, and Aronofsky imagined that a film with this mood would restore Batman’s cinematic reputation, and even go a little further artistically.

Miller agreed to write the screenplay, and Aronofsky contributed his own ideas. The draft of the screenplay available publicly shows the degree of revisionism that the pair were happy to pursue.

The core of the Batman mythos remains the same - young Bruce Wayne witnesses his parents’ deaths at the hands of criminals. But, instead of having superheroism handed to him on a silver platter, the child loses his fortune and stays on the streets. He is brought under the wing of Big Al (Alfred), the black owner of an auto-repair shop. Bruce grows up working there and watches the city deteriorate as he comes of age.

He sees the neighbourhood frequented by pimps, prostitutes (one of whom is Selina Kyle, later Catwoman) and corrupt police officers. His rage at the state of the city leads him into undisguised vigilantism, but mishaps and close escapes make him rethink his approach.

He improvises a costume-a cape and a hockey mask-but his ingenuity grows and he designs advantageous gadgets. The Batman name comes about in new circumstances: Bruce Wayne wears his father Thomas’s initialised ring, and the engraved TW leaves a mark on the skin of beaten criminals that gets compared to a bat. Their tormentor progresses from fighting street-level crime to combatting the source of the problem-endemic police corruption.

Aronofsky’s additions to Miller's work were less aimed at making the script filmable as they were to putting the story into a certain kind of genre, admittedly also with "an independent guerrilla flavor". Aronofsky saw Year One as a companion to 1970s films like Taxi Driver, The French Connection, Death Wish and Serpico-anything involving corruption, societal decay and the complications of justice, whether individual or state-sanctioned.

To this end, the character of Jim Gordon, and his struggles against his Gotham police colleagues, forms a major part of the script, as do his (unhappy) personal relationships. It is as much Gordon's story as it is the young Bruce Wayne's.

Warner had admired Aronofsky’s earlier suggestions for a Dark Knight Returns film (shot in Tokyo with Clint Eastwood as a veteran Bruce Wayne), but were quick to reject Year One’s pitch. An R-rated Batman film would negate the wallet strength of child viewers, and Aronofsky’s basic approach to Bat-hallmarks wasn't exactly great for merchandising. No child was going to buy a Batmobile toy if, in Aronofsky’s own words, it was a “Lincoln Continental with two bus engines in it”. And this was before taking adult Batman fans into account, who would surely take issue with every Aronofskian departure from lore.

So, Miller and Aronofsky’s opportunity came and went, but some of Year One’s creative DNA still made it onto the screen. Before his exit from the project he had been in talks with Christian Bale to play Bruce Wayne. Batman Begins (2005) also functions as an origin story and part of its plot deals with institutional corruption.

In the years after the Dark Knight trilogy’s conclusion Batman has remained popular. In cinema alone he is welcomed across the spectrum of genres, from the played-straight Batman V Superman to the comedy of the Lego Batman Movie. In recent weeks, Warner Bros has signalled a willingness to develop DC characters with films unconnected to the Extended Universe of Justice League, Wonder Woman and others. Gotham citizens lead this approach, with Matt Reeves’s Batman project ambiguously standalone, and a Martin Scorsese-produced origin story for the Joker being announced.

While promoting his new film Mother! Aronofsky was asked about the abandoned film, and he noted the premature nature of his pitch.

“I think we were basically -- whatever it is -- 15 years too early. Because I hear the way they're talking about the Joker movie and that's exactly -- that was my pitch. I was like: we're going to shoot in East Detroit and East New York. We're not building Gotham.”

Even if 2017 is a more fertile environment for adult-oriented superhero films, Aronofsky has not exactly gone without directorial fulfilment. And, as he stated in a 2009 interview, there was another side to the story.

“I never really wanted to make a Batman film”, he told an audience at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. “It was kind of a bait and switch strategy. I was working on Requiem for a Dream and I got a phone call that Warner Bros wanted to talk about Batman. At the time I had this idea for a film called The Fountain which I knew was gonna be this big movie and I was thinking, ‘Is Warner really gonna give me $80 millions to make a film about love and death after I come off a heroin movie? So my theory was if I can write this Batman film and they could perceive me as a writer for it [The Fountain].’”

Aronofsky may have obtained closure more quickly than expected, but for every Batman fan relieved that their favourite character wouldn't be defiled, there are surely others who would be prepared to give it a chance.