Do you know we almost saw more from Tim Burton’s Batman world, specifically Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman?
Before the creative overhaul that led to Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever, Burton and Batman Returns screenwriter Daniel Waters had plans for much more Gotham goodness, and in a recent interview, the writer spoke about creating with Burton and other planned movies for their Batman universe.
Waters tells IndieWire, “[Tim] wanted to do an $18 million black-and-white movie, like the original Cat People, of Selina just low-key living in a small town. And I wanted to make a Batman movie where the metaphor was about Batman. So I had her move to a Los Angeles version of Gotham City, and it’s run by three asshole superheroes. It was The Boys before The Boys. But he got exhausted reading my script.”
The screenwriter also dove into crafting characters like the Penguin and Catwoman without source material, especially before pre-Internet days:
“It was a weird assignment in that I didn’t need to please anyone but Tim Burton. Before the internet, you didn’t have to go before a tribunal and say what you were doing — it was just two guys in a room riffing. We didn’t know shit about Batman villains,” Waters said. “We didn’t really understand the whole comic book thing. I just found out DC Comics stands for Detective Comics.”
“The whole thing about Batman Returns is we got attacked by Batman fans because they thought, ‘This is only the second Batman movie, what the fuck are you doing? You’re already going off-road,” Waters continued. “Now there’s like 50 Batman movies, it’s like, ‘Hey. That was pretty interesting.'”
Tim Burton’s Batman world would be slightly revisited in 2023’s The Flash, which saw Michael Keaton return to his iconic role. As of now, we haven’t seen any more of Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman although rumours hinted at a possible return in the cancelled Batgirl film, but we won’t know what happened there for years to come.
