No, no, don’t panic too much. Joel Schumacher isn’t returning to the Batman franchise. Rather, he’s following up on some of the comments George Clooney made earlier this week about his work in Batman and Robin in which he was thrilled to take on the role but realized what an utter trainwreck the whole thing was. What Schumacher brings to the table with this bit of info is what he wanted to do with the fifth movie that would have happened if Batman and Robin hadn’t done so poorly overall, critically and commercially. Planned to be called Batman Triumphant, it would have had Batman getting gassed by Scarecrow and having visions of his former foes, including Jack Nicholson’s Joker
“I was supposed to do a fifth one. I was talking to Nic Cage about playing the Scarecrow. I had begged the studio for [the Frank Miller comic] ‘The Dark Knight [Returns],’ but they wanted a family friendly, toyetic thing.”
As has been noted, this definitely fits in with how the casting was done during those days when you consider it went from Keaton and Nicholson to Kilker, Clooney and villains like Tommy Lee Jones, Arnold Schawarzenegger, Jim Carrey, Uma Thurman, Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
[Source: The Playlist]
