“Where does he get those wonderful toys?” Jack Nicholson‘s Joker asks in 1989’s “Batman.” Tim Burton‘s blockbuster kicked open the doors for what would eventually become one of the cornerstones of the contemporary studio blockbuster machine. And as the genre has grown bigger, so too has the lucrative merchandising opportunities, and the cool gadgets and gizmos our heroes get to play with. Batman in particular has a nifty arsenal of weaponry, but if “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns” author Frank Miller had his way, Bruce Wayne would have fewer wonderful toys on the big screen.
“My dream would be to make it much smaller,” he told Variety at the Lucca Comics & Games convention when asked about the current state of Batman movies. “To lose the toys and to focus more on the mission, and to use the city a great deal more. Because he’s got a loving relationship with the city he’s protecting. And unlike Superman his connection to crime is intimate; it has been ever since his parents were murdered. And he defeats criminals with his hands. So it would be a different take. But it will never be in my hands, because it would not be a good place to make toys from. There wouldn’t be a line of toys.”
As many know, Miller had his chance to make a Batman movie in the space between Joel Schumacher‘s franchise ender “Batman & Robin,” and before Warner Bros. rebooted the property with Christopher Nolan‘s “Batman Begins.” The film would’ve been directed by Darren Aronofsky, who collaborated with Miller on the screenplay, and pitched the project as a Batman movie in the vein of “Death Wish” or “The French Connection.” It definitely wasn’t for kids.
“It didn’t have the toys in it. The Batmobile was just a tricked-out car. And Batman turned his back on his fortune to live a street life so he could know what people were going through. He built his own Batcave in an abandoned part of the subway. And he created Batman out of whole cloth to fight crime and a corrupt police force,” Miller said of the rejected movie this spring. And talking about it again, he underscores how raw that picture would’ve been.
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“That screenplay was based on my book ‘Batman: Year One,’ and yeah it was much more down to earth. In it a fair amount of time is spent before he became Batman, and when he went out and fought crime he really screwed it up a bunch of times before he got it right. So it was [a] 90-minute origin story,” Miller said.
Even if Hollywood has added more toys to the equation, Miller’s gritty aesthetic has nonetheless been very influential. And it’s a quality we’ll likely see in Ben Affleck’s upcoming “The Batman” which begins production next spring.
