Next week’s “Black Adam” sees Pierce Brosnan joining the DC Universe in the role of Doctor Fate.
Out doing promotion for the film, the former James Bond actor revealed on “The Tonight Show” that at one time he was up for another DC Comics role – that of Batman/Bruce Wayne.
However a simple joke to the film’s director, Tim Burton, potentially cost him the role which ultimately went to Michael Keaton:
I went up for ‘Batman’ way back in the day when Tim Burton was doing it. Obviously, I didn’t get the job. I remember saying something stupid to Tim Burton, I said, ‘You know I can’t understand any man who would wear his underpants outside his trousers.’ But there you go…the best man got the job, and you know Doctor Fate and I were meant to meet on the same page I think.”
Of course a few years later Brosnan went on to snag the James Bond franchise, starring in four films in the series, so he wasn’t short of franchise success.
Meanwhile another name tied to the franchise, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, has spoken some more about the reboot of the property he was attached to almost twenty years ago.
After Joel Schumacher’s “Batman & Robin” but well before Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins,” Aronofsky was attached to what was planned to be a reboot heavily utilising Frank Miller’s graphic novel “Batman: Year One”.
Though Nolan’s film also used some of that comic, Aronofsky’s version was a more small-scale, adult version of the character. Out promoting “The Whale” this week, he tells Variety his version didn’t go ahead because it ultimately came down to an issue of timing:
“It was after ‘Batman & Robin,’ the Joel Schumacher one. That had been a big hiccup back then at Warner Bros., so I pitched them a rated-R, boiled-down origin story of Batman. A rated-R superhero movie was probably 10 to 15 years out of whack with the reality of the business then. It had promise, but it was just a first draft. The studio weren’t really interested. It was a very different take.”
The filmmaker adds that modern superhero films have been more experimental with ratings and tones and were it pitched today, it probably would’ve been made:
“I was always saying, ‘why can’t there be several different types of comic book movies out there.’ Now there are. It’s just our timing was off.”
Aronofsky, who was also attached to a “Wolverine” film at one point, is still open to doing a superhero film in the future: “If the right opportunity came around.”
Source: The Tonight Show, Variety
