Darren Aronofsky’s abandoned Batman movie has become one of those cinematic “what ifs” that fans and film historians love to revisit. Long before Matt Reeves put Robert Pattinson in the cowl, and even before Christopher Nolan reshaped Gotham with Batman Begins, the Pi filmmaker was attached to a gritty reimagining co-written with comic book legend Frank Miller. But as much as people continue to mourn the film-that-never-was, Aronofsky himself has now revealed that making the superhero movie wasn’t even really the goal.
On a recent appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Requiem for a Dream director explained why his interest in Batman was always more complicated than it seemed. As he put it:
I wasn’t on… I was really focused on The Fountain. I really never took that seriously. Um, I wanted to make The Fountain, that’s where I was at.
In other words, the Dark Knight was never the main event. The Mother! filmmaker admitted that his attachment to Gotham’s caped crusader was more of a strategy to push his passion project into reality. He continued:
We [Frank Miller] co-wrote a script, but my whole strategy on that one was I wanted to make this totally wild, crazy film about love and the search for the fountain of youth. And I felt like if I was on Batman, they might let me make it, which is kind of what happened, sort of.
This gritty, low-budget take on Batman might have seemed outrageous back in the early 2000s, but looking at it from 2025, it feels ahead of its time. After all, Robert Pattinson’s The Batman proved just how well a darker, grounded approach can work.
Aronofsky's vision for Batman was wild in its own right. As he recalled, he and Miller had dreamed up a brutal, low-budget, street-level take on the character that had little in common with the glossy superhero spectacles audiences were used to at the time. He added:
But it was also, you know, I think, um, The Batman me and Frank pitched… or wrote… was a really kind of down and dirty, duct tape type of movie that was never really going to, uh, it wasn’t going to be selling Batmobiles. You know, I don’t think I was the right guy at the right time. It was rated R… I think a whole world of superhero films had to first come out to scrape the bottom of that barrel before they would go to rated R films, like some of the later ones.
It’s a fascinating “too early” moment in superhero cinema. Years later, audiences would embrace darker R-rated comic book movie fare like Logan and Joker, but in the early 2000s, studios were still laser-focused on toy sales and four-quadrant blockbusters. Aronofsky’s “duct tape” Batman never stood a chance.
The casting conversation also revealed how different the superhero landscape was back then. When asked if the rumor was true that he would have cast Joaquin Phoenix as Bruce Wayne, the Wrestler director confirmed that the studio had a former teen heartthrob in mind:
Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. But, you know, famously, I pitched Joaquin and they were into Freddy Prince Jr… it was like a very different world.
It’s almost surreal to imagine how history might have unfolded if Phoenix, who went on to join the ranks of comic-book Oscar winners for his performance in Joker, had donned the cape in the early 2000s. Instead, Nolan’s grounded but accessible Batman Begins would define the character for a new generation, and Aronofsky moved on to make The Fountain, a polarizing movie for sure, but he admits it was the project he cared about most all along.
Fans like myself who are still bummed it never happened and are still daydreaming about what his take on the Caped Crusader could have looked like, for Darren Aronofsky, the character was never the endgame. Instead, it was a stepping stone to telling the story he truly wanted.
Be sure to check out our list of upcoming DC movies to see what's up and coming for the DCU on the 2026 movie schedule and beyond.
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