Nothing but Shadows. Murdered Heroes in Hollywood

Hollywood is the great dream factory, but its nightmares are far more fascinating, as David Lynch would make perfectly clear. Every blockbuster we celebrate rests on the corpse of a hundred films that never made it to theaters, films that could have redefined cinema. Nicolas Cage as Iron Man. Cage as Superman under Tim Burton’s direction. Phoenix as Batman in the most brutal vision ever conceived. These aren’t mere casting curiosities: they’re parallel universes where art triumphed over marketing.

Burton admitted something few superhero film directors would ever confess: he hated comic books, but adored their revolutionary creators. Alan Moore and Frank Miller had demolished Batman’s childish mythology, turning him into something worthy of Dostoevsky’s pen. When Burton chose Michael Keaton for Batman in 1989, the protests were apocalyptic. Fans saw a comedian where a hero was needed. They were all wrong. Burton saw what they couldn’t: restraining Keaton’s madness would make wonders for his performance. Keaton’s controlled lunacy was the perfect Batman to face another genuine maniac, Jack Nicholson. Fight fire with fire, as Metallica would say.

Burton’s accidental genius was staging a duel between two functional psychopaths. Keaton could have played the Joker with the same mastery as Batman, channeling that unhinged energy that made him a specialist in winged and manic characters: Batman, Birdman, Vulture. Nicholson, meanwhile, was born to be the Joker, though Heath Ledger would surpass him decades later by channeling Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. A brutal irony: Willem Dafoe, who auditioned for the Joker, would later share the screen with future Batman Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse, creating the kind of psychological tension his Joker never got to explore. Dafoe would become the Green Goblin in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. I’ve always thought the Green Goblin has a lot of the Joker in him, and a touch of the Wicked Witch of the West.

But the lost film that should keep cinephiles awake at night is another: Darren Aronofsky’s Batman, which Warner Bros. killed in 2000. Aronofsky, master of psychological horror who gave us Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, worked with Frank Miller on something that would have redefined the superhero genre forever. His Batman would be dirty, violent, raised on the streets. More Taxi Driver than Dark Knight. More Scorsese than Burton.

The choice of Joaquin Phoenix as Bruce Wayne was both brilliant and terrifying. Years before becoming the most controversial Joker, Phoenix would have played his future character’s enemy in a version executives deemed too disturbing for audiences. Warner wanted something “marketable.” They got Batman Forever. The Aronofsky–Miller script became legendary, a cult artifact passed around by collectors like forbidden scripture.

Miller wasn’t brought in by chance. His 1980s stories resurrected Batman from commercial death, inspired Burton, laid the foundation for Nolan, and guided Matt Reeves. Miller understands that the best superheroes aren’t aspirational: they’re psychiatric case studies. His Batman is obsession and control. His influence even reaches Moon Knight, another character born from The Shadow, exploring mental fragmentation where Batman only scratches the surface.

Moon Knight would have been the perfect character for Aronofsky: multiple identities, mystical visions, that delirious ambiguity between mental illness and divine power. James McAvoy could play him, or better yet, Phoenix returning to the psychological territory Warner once denied him. The connection to M. Night Shyamalan is inevitable: Unbreakable remains one of the best superhero films ever made, a dark deconstruction that shares DNA with Aronofsky’s lost Batman.

Could Shyamalan direct Phoenix as Batman? His work in Split, Glass, Unbreakable and Trap proves he understands fractured psychology better than any Marvel or DC director. But Hollywood prefers the safe, the testable, the sellable. It would rather churn out Iron Man 27 than risk a disturbing masterpiece.

I’m convinced the best films were never made. They exist in that limbo where art and commerce fought battles that art lost. Yet their ghosts will forever haunt every mediocre blockbuster, reminding us of what could have been. In those shadows lives the real superhero cinema: brutal, honest, terrifying. Exactly as it should be.