Batman vs Superman: A tangled screenplay history
In the early 2000s, thankfully, a Batman vs Superman project didn't get off the ground. If it had, we might have never had Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy - and Eminem might have been Batman.
2016 brought us Zack Snyder’s 'Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.’ Well, that may make it sound as if it had been a precious gift - it wasn’t. I’ll let you Google what the many voices have said (and screamed), all I’ll add is: Martha.
Long before that overblown wreck lumbered across the silver screens, other executives had hired other writers and, in the early 2000s, Andrew Kevin Walker (of Se7en fame) and Akiva Goldsman (the writer behind such scripts as I am Legend, I Robot and, yeah well, Batman & Robin, did revisions) delivered the Batman vs Superman script, working title ‘Asylum.’
Find the complete Batman vs Superman ‘Asylum’ script here
The idea then had been that both superheroes were middle-aged and best friends. Bruce Wayne had retired and was about to get married. Clark Kent was about to get divorced from his not-so-eternal love Lois Lane. Then Bruce’s new wife dies, with a horrible smile on her face, during their honeymoon. You know where this is going. They had thought the Joker long dead and gone - wrong! Then it’s essentially about Bruce Wayne wanting to get back into the Batman suit and go on a murdering rampage - with Superman standing in the way because, heck, thou shalt not kill and all that. There’s a lot going on in the script - and a lot of it just doesn’t work. It didn’t then, and, mind you, it also didn’t years later with the Snyder film.
Truthfully, I’m glad this film never happened. The project might have made both Superman and Batman toxic, from a studio point of view, for years to come. Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy might have never happened in that case. By the way, Christian Bale had, even back in the time of the ‘Asylum’ script, been considered for the role of Batman. Among the actors considered for the two iconic roles were apparently also Jude Law, Josh Hartnett and Colin Farrell. Hard to believe (but heck, I found it on the internet so it must be true - even Eminem was rumored to play Batman after the success of 8 Mile).
With Wolfgang Peterson set to direct, the project was green-lit. What can I say, good thing, for once, that things went the way they went and the rest is Dark Knight history … ah, wait a second, then came Snyder, of course, with Ben Affleck as the bat. On the funnier side of things: When Affleck was announced as the new Batman, someone on Twitter suggested that Matt Damon should play the role of Poison Ivy. Made me smile.
One of the considerable flaws in the ‘Asylum’ script was the Superman was essentially sidelined with little to do for a big part of the script. Scriptshadow, who has been been reviewing scripts for years, adds a valuable thought at the end of his review: “You can’t just leave a character on the shelf and pick him back up when you need him. We’ve all done this. We have our main storyline (here, it’s Batman investigating his wife’s murder) and then a key character who we don’t quite know what to do with in the meantime. So we “put him on the shelf” (give him a boring stagnant storyline) until we need him again. Never put a character on the shelf. Always have him/her pushing towards something so they remain active, relevant, and interesting.”
Highly prolific and successful Hollywood screenwriter David Goyer apparently said this at the time: “Batman vs. Superman is where you go when you admit to yourself that you’ve exhausted all possibilities. It’s like Frankenstein meets Wolfman, or Freddy vs. Jason. It’s somewhat of an admission that your franchise is on its last grasp.” Flash forward about ten years - none other than David Goyer himself wrote the Batman vs. Superman script for the Snyder film. Mind you, he had worked with Nolan on the Dark Knight trilogy and had written Man of Steel. On one hand, seems like a logical trajectory, on the other hand - he should have remembered his own words.
