2009 Batman vs Superman
WHAT WE KNOW: Yahoo Movies[]
Director: Wolfgang PetersenScreenwriters: Andrew Kevin Walker and Akiva GoldsmanVillains: Lex Luthor and The Joker
A decade before Warner Bros. electrified Comic-Con 2013 by announcing Batman and Superman would share the big screen, the studio considered bringing D.C.’s two biggest heroes together for the ambitious Batman Vs. Superman.
The Superman film franchise had stalled thanks to the 1987 flop Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. As late as 1990, a fifth film was in the works with the possibility for Christopher Reeve to reprise his celebrated role, while Tim Burton and Nicolas Cage came close to reviving Superman in the late 1990s with Superman Lives.
In 2002, the studio teamed director Wolfgang Petersen, then best known for helming Air Force One and The Perfect Storm, with with Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker. While Walker says his script has never been leaked online, a rewrite by Akiva Goldsman has been circulating for years.
The Goldsman rewrite for Batman Vs. Superman begins with among the most unlikely things imaginable: Bruce Wayne’s wedding. Bruce has been retired for five years, his bride knowing nothing of his former life as Batman. During Bruce’s honeymoon, his bride is killed, all signs pointing to The Joker as the culprit. This prompts The Batman out of retirement to seek out his mortal enemy, whom he believes had died years earlier.
Clark Kent is going through changes of his own, with his wife Lois Lane having left him. After serving as Bruce’s best man earlier in the ceremony — and foiling a terror attack in an action-packed opening scene — he returns to Smallville. Both his parents have died, but his former love interest Lana Lang is still back in Kansas, and he rekindles a romance.
Bruce goes about violently tearing up the underworld to get to The Joker. Eventually it’s revealed Lex Luthor and The Joker have been behind all of their troubles — from the terror attack on Metropolis to the death of Bruce’s wife. The Joker actually plucked Bruce’s wife from obscurity and molded her into a woman Bruce would love, manipulating the couple into falling in love.
During the course of the film, a grief-stricken Batman and his friend Superman have a massive battle, with Luthor having helped pit them against each other. Batman (suited up in kryptonite-laced armor) duke it out and they fight to a massive, bloody stalemate.
The friends reconcile in time to take on The Joker and Luthor. When Bruce wants to murder The Joker, Clark gives Bruce his consent to kill the villain, with the stipulation that he must take off his mask off.
“Don’t hide behind it. Don’t pretend there’s some other part of you doing this,” Clark says. “This is your right, as a human being. Your retribution. So do this as the man who’s going to live with it for the rest of his life. Take off the mask.”
Batman spares The Joker, with that climactic speech a key to what the filmmakers wanted to explore: the notion of duel identities and why Bruce and Clark wield them, the idea that they put on their separate identities to pretend it was someone else doing these things.
Sam Dickerman, then the head of Petersen’s production company, pushed Walker not just to conceptualize the film as a superhero flick.
“Sam said 'let’s write this as if we want this to be a movie that gets considered for an Academy Award,” says Walker. “It’s not supposed to be some kind of disposable popular culture. We wanted to take the character seriously.”
The 9/11 terror attacks occurred while Walker was working on the script, an event that shifted the American psyche in innumerable ways — including what types of media the public craved. TV shows like 24 suddenly tapped into what Americans wanted, while on the Superhero front, Walker argues Superman became more needed than ever.
“There was a terrorist event in the screenplay that took on an entirely different timbre,” says Walker. "In the years after, both [DC’s] Geoff Johns and [Marvel Studios chief] Kevin Feige, at different points made the observation about how before 9/11, Batman was always the cooler, cynical, 'Dark Knight’ character and Superman to a certain extent was regarded as a little more wholesome, a little old fashioned and at certain points wasn’t as admired as a character. Post-9/11, Superman became much more what people really wanted and needed in a way.“
Walker turned in his script, and Goldsman took a pass — adding among other things, Clark Kent’s divorce, which hadn’t been in the original. Petersen spoke about the film to the press as late as 2002, with the film officially slated for a 2004 release.
It didn’t take long for the studio to decide to keep its two franchises separate. Nolan was hired to tackle Batman in 2003 and J.J. Abrams took a stab at a Superman script with McG set to direct before Bryan Singer was brought on board to direct Superman Returns.
Walker recalls fondly writing the script, especially writing for Superman.
"One of the Supermans I most admire was Richard Donner’s Superman,” says Walker. "Just that idea of Superman as a mixture of an alien and almost a Christlike or Godlike figure. Even if he was just hovering above a scene and having a discussion with someone with his cape waving behind him, there was always a really strong image. Even on the page, you really felt that stuff very strongly.“