He is the Lord of the Night. The Dark Knight who torments Gotham’s criminals. He is… apparently, Clint Eastwood. Yeah, the legendary actor and director was on the Hollywood list to be Bruce Wayne after the fiasco of ‘Batman and Robin’: one of those stories in which we’d give anything to see if it came to light on Earth-2.
Come on, make my night
We all know what happened after the fourth part of ‘Batman’, which returned to the camp spirit of the 60s series with a quality, let’s say, peculiar. The bat-nipples, the bat-credit card, the script at your own pace. Contrary to popular belief, he didn’t make the studio lose money, but he did scare enough to mark the end of the Night Lord for eight years, until Christopher Nolan did him justice with ‘Batman Begins’. Yes indeed, Warner didn’t give up looking for new ways to bring the character back to life.
AND one of the projects that most resonated with fans it was ‘Batman: DarKnight’, which, it is said, would have been the complete opposite of Joel Schumacher’s carefree film. In fact, it told the story of Dick Grayson as a prisoner of the Scarecrow, who was doing experiments on his body. But, at the same time, Paul Dini, one of the key names in the history of the Batman (among many other achievements, creator of Harley Quinn for ‘Batman: The Animated Series’), he was preparing another hero movie, the exact opposite of George Clooney, starring an already withered superhero.
Dini was in charge of bring to the big screen the fabulous animated series ‘Batman of the future’ (better known as ‘Batman Beyond’), which lasted 52 episodes between 1999 and 2001 and told the story of an elderly Bruce Wayne helping a new Batman. At Warner they kept frolicking trying to find the right approach. Why not an ancient hero? And already put, who better to play an elderly superhero than Clint Eastwood?
It must be borne in mind that at the time when the adaptation was being considered, Eastwood was already 70 years old and he came from directing ‘Space cowboys’, demonstrating his full form. In fact, in later years he did ‘Mystic River’ and ‘Million dollar baby’… but we would never see a trace of the masked superhero. And it’s not that the ‘Batman Beyond’ project was put in a drawer: before James Gunn and Peter Safran took over the company, It is said that there was a project to resuscitate her but starring… Michael Keaton. Bat-closed circle.
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