It’s July of 2013 and Warner Bros. just announced that they will be teaming up Batman and Superman in a live-action film to be released in 2015. However, 11 years ago Warner Bros. announced the same dang thing, but that Batman/Superman film was canceled a month later. That does not seem likely to happen again, but what the hell happened 11 years ago? What follows is the strange, crazy story of Batman vs. Superman.
Let’s start in 1997. Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin was released to scathing reviews and horrendous world-of-mouth. It was not a complete financial failure ($238 million worldwide on $125 million budget) after you factor in ancillary sales from the toy market, but the response was negative enough that a planned sequel featuring the Scarecrow as the villain was scrapped. It was time for a new direction.
Some things once seen can never be un-seen.
Joel Schumacher desperately wanted to atone for his camptastic sins and do a gritty Batman film based upon Frank Miller’s graphic novel Batman: Year One. Warner Bros. liked the idea, just not the person proposing it. They gave Darren Aronofsky, hot off of his film debut Pi, a shot to work with Frank Miller on adapting Year One into a screenplay. The two, well, they went a little crazy. What they wrote had the basic Year One plot, but their primary motivation seemed to be to make even Tim Burton crap his pants out of fear of the Dirty Harry/Taxi Driver-esque version of Bruce Wayne they had created. Aronofsky approached Christian Bale to play Batman.
While Aronofsky and Miller were off laughing “They’re totally never going to actually make this movie, but can you believe how much they paid us for our script anyway?”, Warner Bros. was exploring alternate options. What about having the Wachowski Bros., fresh off of The Matrix, do it? Nah. What about adapting the animated show Batman Beyond, focusing on an older, retired Bruce Wayne tutoring a new teenaged Batman? Well, they actually went a little further with that idea. There was a script (from Paul Dini and Alan Burnett) and even an attached director (Boaz Yakin). However, they shut it down pretty quickly.
Then in late 2001 screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en, Sleepy Hollow) walked in the door and pitched something that seemed like it would solve all of their problems: Batman vs. Superman. At that point, Warner Bros. had been trying to bring Batman back since 1997 and Superman back since 1993, when producer Jon Peters (the 1989 Batman) had been hired to revive the franchise. Tim Burton was supposed to direct Superman Lives with Nicholas Cage in the title role. However, even though $30 million had been spent in pre-production Burton quit in 1998 because he basically hated Jon Peters (and the budget was spiraling out of control). The Superman Lives script, which was to focus on the famous “Death of Superman” storyline in the comics, was trashed. Instead, they were thinking that maybe a new origin story would be the way to go, and an up and comer named J.J. Abrams was hired to write a screenplay and McG to direct it.
Nicholas Cage as Superman.
However, teaming up Superman and Batman just made so much sense. Plus, Walker’s script, which was re-written by Akiva Goldsman (Batman Forever, Batman & Robin), had the best parts of what they’d already been talking about. The story combined the grittiness of the Daren Aronofsky/Frank Miller Year One approach with the retired-hero angle of the Batman Beyond approach. Bruce Wayne would begin the film 5 years into his post-Batman retirement, having never fully recovered after Dick “Robin” Grayson died in the line of duty. However, Bruce falls in love and gets married. Clark Kent, on the other hand, has been dumped by Lois Lane, and is now courting his old childhood flame Lana Lang.
Bruce’s happiness goes bye-bye when the Joker shows up and kills his wife (and on their honeymoon, the rat-bastard). This results in Bruce nearly beating The Joker to death before Superman shows up to intercede. Out of grief, Bruce becomes Batman again mostly just to go around beating the living hell out of people. Superman pulls him aside for your standard, “Maybe you should tone it down a little, y’know?” Batman responds with a dramatic, “I’ll kill you!” and an insane fight scene ensue.
This is exactly what Lex Luthor intended when he had the Joker make Batman a widower, and when Batman and Superman find that out they put the smack down on their candy asses.
Enough people at the studio liked the script that it was greenlit and announced in July of 2002. It was supposed to begin filming in 2003 for a Summer 2004 release. Wolfgang Peterson (Das Boot, The Perfect Storm) was going to direct, and Josh Hartnett (remember him?) and Christian Bale were the front-runners to play Superman and Batman respectively. However, the project was canceled little more than a month later in August, and Peterson quit to direct Troy.
So, what the hell happened? J.J. Abrams, Spider-Man, and a whole lot of studio intrigue, that’s what. Separate from Batman vs. Superman, Abrams had been hired to help the studio move on from the Superman Lives debacle with a new origins story script. Entitled Superman: Flyby (or Superman I), Abrams’ script was pretty darn crazy, departing from canon in significant ways. Kal-El is sent to Earth because of a civil war on Krypton which his father, Jor-El, is about to lose. The planet itself, though, does not explode nor is it in any danger of doing so. Superman is killed by four Kryptonians who come to Earth looking for him, but he goes to Kryptonian heaven, is resurrected and defeats the bad guys. At film’s end, he departs for Krypton, setting up two intended sequels which could partially take place on Krypton. Oh, and Lex Luthor is a government spy on Earth tasked with monitoring extraterrestrial threats, but in the film’s big twist it turns out Luthor is secretly a Kryptonian himself.
The first part of this script arrived in early July of 2002. So, Warner Bros. had just announced Batman vs. Superman when suddenly they fell in love with Abrams’ lighter, more hopeful script which the marketing people said had superior long-term prospects for toy, home video, and ancillary market sales. Crucially, this was at a time when Warner Bros. was watching 20th Century Fox break box office records with their remarkably light Spider-Man. It seemed as if the market had changed, and Abrams’ script knew that whereas the one for Batman vs. Superman did not.
Thus began a studio powerplay. Executive Vice President for Worldwide Motion Pictures Lorenzo di Bonaventura still believed in Batman vs. Superman. Senior Vice President of Production Bob Brassel and producer Jon Peters believed in Abrams’ script. The studio president, Alan Horn, decided they would do the Superman film, and Bonaventura resigned within days of Horn’s decision in September of 2002. Horn later explained that he believed they should revive Batman and Superman separately and organically build to a team-up film.
So, Batman vs. Superman was dead. The J.J. Abrams Superman script moved forward, although the process had dragged on for so long that the original director of the Abrams script, McG, had already left to direct another movie (Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle) and become available again. However, the job ultimately went to Bryan Singer in 2004, who completely ignored the Abrams script and crafted a new one with his X2 screenwriters. That’s how 2006′s Superman Returns happened.
Batman was left in limbo for a while, with Batman comic book writer Grant Morrison even submitting a screenplay focusing on Batman travelling the world before returning to Gotham and battling Ra’s al-Guhl and Man-Bat. However, Christopher Nolan was hired in early 2003 to revive the Batman franchise. Rather than use and/or adapt one of the existing screenplays, Nolan created his own with screenwriter David S. Goyer. They basically took Frank Miller’s Year One, not his screenplay with Aronofsky but the original graphic novel, and married it to Dennis O’Neal’s 1989 Batmans origin story “The Man Who Falls.” That’s how 2005′s Batman Begins happened.
Alan Horn’s plan for Batman and Superman obviously didn’t quite work out as hoped, since Superman Returns failed to revive the franchise whereas we all know what happened with Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies. Horn left Warner Bros. to become the Chairman of Walter Disney Studios early last year. However, now that Superman and Batman are finally teaming up maybe somewhere Horn is smiling…until he looks at the box office projections for The Lone Ranger again.
Sources:
Glen Weldon’s Superman: An Unauthorized Biography. Amazon.com
David Hughes’ Tales from Development Hell: The Greatest Movies Never Made?. Amazon.com
