Joker was nearly the Caped Crusader.
Two months after Joaquin Phoenix’s Academy Award triumph for his twisted portrayal of supervillain Arthur Fleck in “Joker,” film director Darren Aronofsky claims he wanted the actor to play Batman in an early 2000s reboot.
But Warner Bros. bigwigs had a more affable actor in mind — Freddie Prinze Jr.
“I remember thinking, ‘Uh oh, we’re making two different films here.’ That’s a true story. It was a different time,” the Oscar-nominated filmmaker told Empire magazine. “The Batman I wrote was definitely a way different type of take than they ended up making.”
Aronofsky, 51, who originally had been chosen to direct the new Batman series following the rousing success of “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream,” eventually left the project. “The Batman that was out before me was “Batman & Robin,” the famous one with the nipples on the Batsuit, so I was really trying to undermine that, and reinvent it. That’s where my head went.”
At the time, 1997’s “Batman & Robin,” starring George Clooney and Chris O’Donnell, had been the most recent silver-screen adaptation. Co-starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze, the Joel Schumacher-directed feature was torched by critics.
“Although we don’t get the POW! and WHAM! cartoon graphics, [“Batman & Robin”] seems inspired more by the TV series than the Bob Kane comic character,” griped Roger Ebert in his review.
Prinze, now 44, was a bankable, young star in the late 1990s and early 2000s with box-office hits “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” “She’s All That” and “Summer Catch” already under his belt.
Ultimately, Christopher Nolan was tapped to direct the superhero reboot, beginning with 2005’s “Batman Begins” with Christian Bale in the title role.
Nolan would later direct the sequels “The Dark Knight,” for which Heath Ledger won an Oscar for his portrayal of The Joker, and “The Dark Knight Rises.”