9) Batman: Year One
After the profound debacle that was Batman & Robin, Warner Bros. knew they needed another Batman film, they just didn’t know who, what, why and how. A number of ideas were floated around, including a big screen live-action Batman Beyond, but the efforts of the studio ended up falling behind a smaller, but no less ambitious idea: an adaptation of Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One directed by Darren Aronofsky.
Then coming off the twin low-budget successes of Pi and Requiem for a Dream, Aronofsky was the ideal choice for making the Dark Knight dark again, but with a price tag that wouldn’t have had quite as many zeroes in it. The director immediately approached Miller to help him adapt the Year One story, which would have stripped down the Batman mythos further by impoverishing the young Bruce Wayne, made police detective Gordon a strung out lifer in the Gotham PD on the brink of suicide, and focused more on street crime of Gotham City in vivid, hard-R rating detail.
Unfortunately, the studio became more enamoured with the idea of a big-budget Batman V Superman project than a low-budget Batman solo film. Although Batman V Superman wouldn’t see the light of day (in that form anyway), many of the components of Batman: Year One would find their way into Christopher Nolan’s 2005 movie Batman Begins. It ended up being nowhere near as dark as Aronofsky’s version, but Nolan did cast the director’s choice for the Dark Knight, Christian Bale, and preserved a very grounded, realistic take on Batman that was well-received by fans and critics.