At this point, I’m a little concerned that Michael Keaton’s Batman return could just be a nostalgia play. After all, Michael Keaton remains the best Batman and I’d hate to see him show up in a movie where he and the director aren’t aligned on their vision of the character as a dark, depressed loner.
Ironically, considering Keaton bowed out after he felt Schumacher was taking the franchise in too light-hearted a direction, we could have seen even more of that loner in “Batman Forever.” There is a version of the film which is a lot darker than the theatrical cut, and dedicated fans have long been clamoring for the “Schumacher cut” to see the light of day.
As screenwriter Akiva Goldsman explained:
“In the screenplay and in the movie that we shot there is a very different center of the movie where [Bruce Wayne] opens up the book and the last entry is, ‘Martha and I want to stay home tonight but Bruce insists on going to see a movie.’ And so the idea was that somewhere Bruce remembered and had repressed his fantasy that this was all his fault […] And so the whole movie was actually built around this kind of psychological reckoning […] It was a much more complex, really kind of fun, but much darker, version of the movie.”
That movie exists in the Warner Bros. vaults somewhere, and would be incredible to see cut together. It also seems like it would have been a great fit for Keaton’s brooding Bruce Wayne, which raises the question of just how Schumacher pitched this project to him all those years ago. Let’s hope we get to see some of that darker, “psychological reckoning” in “The Flash.”
