Joaquin Phoenix Could Have Been Batman if Darren Aronofsky

Joaquin Phoenix turned in a surprising lead efficiency in final 12 months’s “Joker” that landed him the very best actor Oscar, however in a unique world (hopefully there’s no COVID-19 in that one), the environmentalist vegan may have been the Caped Crusader as an alternative.

In an interview with Empire journal, “Mother” and “Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky mentioned that his imaginative and prescient for a brand new tackle Batman would have concerned Phoenix, not Christian Bale,

“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,” Aronofsky informed the journal. “That’s the place my head went… The studio wished Freddie Prinze Jr. and I wished Joaquin Phoenix.

“I remember thinking, ‘Uh oh, we’re making two different films here.’ That’s a true story,” he mentioned. “It was a different time. The Batman I wrote was definitely a way different type of take than they ended up making.”

Warner Bros had tapped Aronofsky to take a stab at a brand new route for Batman within the early 2000s after the success of his breakout movie “Requiem for a Dream.”

The director informed Empire that his method was nearer to an adaptation of Frank Miller’s seminal “Batman: Year One” comedian, with some components of “Death Wish,” “The French Connection” and “Taxi Driver” (that movie was additionally thrown into comparisons to Todd Philips’ “Joker” from final 12 months).

Of course, Aronofsky didn’t find yourself helming what grew to become “Batman Begins”; that obligation went to Christopher Nolan. And Phoenix must wait a short time longer to ultimately develop into the villain within the DC universe after Bale was solid because the Dark Knight.

Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy went on to gross greater than $2.four billion worldwide, and nab a posthumous Oscar for Heath Ledger’s efficiency because the Joker in 2008’s “The Dark Knight.”