Following Joel Schumacher’s 1997 franchise killer Batman & Robin, Warner Bros. launched several attempts to reboot the Dark Knight prior to Christopher Nolan’s successful resurrection of the series with Batman Begins.
In August 2000, while Darren Aronofsky and Frank Miller were devloping an adaptation of Miller’s Batman: Year One, the studio enlisted director Boaz Yakin (Remember the Titans) to work alongside Paul Dini and Alan Burnett on a live-action adaptation of the animated series Batman Beyond, and now Yakin has shared some details on the ultimately aborted project during an interview with IGN.
“I had just made Remember the Titans and my inclination is to always go off a trend: make an independent film after I make a studio film. I spoke to my agent, and he said, ‘I think you need to do another studio movie before you do that.’ I was just basically like, ‘Well, if I’m going to do a studio movie, like, I want it to be Batman‘ — which at the time I just meant, if I’m going to do a studio movie, I want it to be a big ol’ thing. He came back to me and said, ‘I have a meeting set up for you at Warner Bros. about Batman.’ I was like, ‘What!? [Laughs] Okay.’ I guess at the time I think Darren Aronofsky was developing a Batman: Year One type of thing. So I said, ‘Okay, let me see what I can do,’ and I came up with this pitch on Batman Beyond.”
Yakin went on to discuss his vision for the movie, as well as his reasons for abandoning the project: “It was almost like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man but a little bit darker — a teenage, kind of futuristic, cyberpunk Batman thing. [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.’ 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]”
Would you have liked to see a live-action Batman Beyond movie from Boaz Yakin? Is there room in the new DC Cinematic Universe for Terry McGinnis to make his big screen debut? Let us know in the comments below…
https://youtu.be/yIuEu1m0p2M?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng
Originally published June 15, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
