DC COMICS: 90'S Batman Franchise (Batman DarKnight)

DC COMICS IN THE MEDIA

BATMAN FAMILY IN THE MEDIA

90'S BATMAN FRANCHISE

WHAT WE KNOW: Yahoo Movies
Screenwriters: Lee Shapiro and Stephen Wise

Villains: Scarecrow and Man-Bat

Stars: George Clooney and Chris O'Donnell

In the weeks after Batman & Robin’s release, two young screenwriters Lee Shapiro and Stephen Wise were meeting with Greg Silverman, then a junior production executive, about a post-apocalyptic script they were working on. While Protosevich’s script for Schumacher wasn’t yet officially dead, Shapiro and Wise got wind the studio was potentiality looking for new directions for Batman and Silverman asked them where they would take the franchise.

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The pair went off and brainstormed for a few weeks, coming back to Warner Bros. and impressing Lassally enough with their pitch that he commissioned a script, which the studio hoped would  divorce the franchise from Batman & Robin while remaining in the same continuity as the Burton/ Schumacher films.

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“Our script was just a direct answer to the last movie. Everything we were doing was, ‘What did they do? Let’s not do that,’ ” recalls Shapiro.

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The script for Batman: DarKnight, which was written with the idea that Clooney and O'Donnell might return,  is in some ways more of a Robin/Dick Grayson story than a Batman one. It begins with a Bruce Wayne living as a recluse, retired after a tragedy caused him to hang up the cape and cowl.

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At Bruce’s urging, Dick Grayson is in college, though he still has plans to fight crime. At school, Dick clashes with Prof. Jonathan Crane (Scarecrow), who suffers from a disease that prevents him from feeling physical pain. Dick challenges one of Crane’s academic positions in front of the whole class, enraging the villain. The Scarecrow eventually kidnaps Dick, experiments on him and throws him in Arkham asylum.

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Kirk Langstrom/Man-Bat is also in the mix as a second villain, who was once a colleague of Crane’s, but who is turned into the Man-Bat thanks to one of the Scarecrow’s experiments.

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The script had a Halloween theme, and is more gruesome than previous Batman had been.

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“His sense of touch is off, so it’s heightened his other senses, and it made him like a living scarecrow,” Shapiro says of Scarecrow. “He gets physically scarred during a confrontation with Man-Bat, and that scarring of his face becomes his mask. It becomes the stitches he puts on himself, and the cauterizing of the wounds and all of that stuff. His face becomes the scarecrow mask.”

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The men envisioned their film as the first in the trilogy, and they planted Easter eggs that was to pay off in sequels. In the third act of DarKnight, Crane releases all of the inmates from Arkham Asylum, with one of the doctors injured in the breakout named Harleen Quinzel, who ends up in a coma and would become Harley Quinn in a sequel. By the third film, Dick (absent from the second film) would grow from Robin to Nightwing and help Batman defend Gotham from Killer Croc and Clayface.

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The screenwriters cranked out the script in three months. They would spend the next two years waiting to see what Warner Bros. would do with it.

“Our contacts kept changing,” recalls Shapiro, whose script shuffled from exec to exec as the studio was deciding that making a clean break from the Schumaker/Burton continuity was the best course of action.

Wise and Shapirio tried to charm Warner Bros. execs by mailing them action figures of Scarecrow and Man-Bat, but it was no use. By early 2001, Jeff Robinov was placed in charge of Batman and ultimately told the men the studio had decided to pass. Warner Bros. was ready to wipe its hands clean of the past.

“That was where the term reboot came from. They basically wanted to start over,” says Wise.