After the Batman franchise fizzled out in the late ’90s thanks to Joel Schumacher‘s painful "Batman & Robin," Warner Bros. tossed around a handful of ideas to revive the character’s cinematic fortunes. There was a planned "Batman & Robin" followup called "Batman Triumphant" that was scrapped after the failure of the former, Darren Aronofsky developed the ambitious "Batman: Year One," while Boaz Yakin was tinkering with "Batman Beyond," a live action take on the animated series. It never got very far, but in a new interview with IGN, Yakin describes what his movie might’ve been like.
"It was almost like Sam Raimi‘s ‘Spider-Man‘ but a little bit darker —a teenage, kind of futuristic, cyberpunk Batman thing," he explained. But at the time, Yakin was riding high off "Remember The Titans," and while a bigger studio movie seemed like the right play on paper, the filmmaker came to realize he didn’t have the passion to really commit to "Batman Beyond."
"[I] very quickly got the feeling that I would be in the zone, the madness, and I didn’t really have the heart for it at the time, and I basically bailed after one draft. I just went, ‘I can’t do this,’ " Yakin admitted. "It might have really hurt my career. I went off and wrote the best script I ever wrote that never got made. But it was just one of those moments in time where you think you want to do something, and then you realize you don’t really want to do it, and for some reason it’s on your IMDb page for the rest of your life. [Laughs]"
It’s refreshingly honest talk from the director, and Warner Bros. did just fine with their franchise once Christopher Nolan made "Batman Begins." But what do you think? Was there promise in "Batman Beyond"? Let us know below.
