Joss Whedon Talks About His Rejected BATMAN Film

Joss Whedon may be the mastermind behind THE AVENGERS (read my review RIGHT HERE!), but did you know that around the time of “Firefly”, he was in talks to direct the new BATMAN movie?

In an in-depth interview with GQ magazine, Whedon revealed that he was given a chance to pitch his take on the Caped Crusader to Warner Bros. In fact, he felt very confident in his vision, mostly due to a scene in which young Bruce Wayne tries to protect a girl from being bullied in an alley amidst his parents’ death:

“[Bruce Wayne] is like this tiny 12-year-old who’s about to get the sh*t kicked out of him. And then it cuts to Wayne Manor, and Alfred is running like something terrible has happened, and he finds Bruce, and he’s back from the fight, and he’s completely fine. And Bruce is like, ‘I stopped them. I can stop them.’ That was the moment for me. When he goes ‘Oh, wait a minute; I can actually do something about this.’ The moment he gets that purpose, instead of just sort of being overwhelmed by the grief of his parents’ death.”

Despite Whedon’s excitement, the executives from Warner Bros did not feel the same way…a reaction that made him question his investment in his projects:

“And the executive was looking at me like I was Agent Smith [from ‘The Matrix’] made of numbers. He wasn’t seeing me at all…And I was driving back to work, and I was like, ‘Why did I do that? Why did I get so invested in that Batman story? How much more evidence do I need that the machine doesn’t care about my vision? And I got back to work and got a phone call that ‘Firefly’ was cancelled.”

Whedon has recently been the go-to guy for superhero movies.  Besides AVENGERS, Whedon was going to write and direct WONDER WOMAN for producer Joel Silver, and was in talks for IRON MAN at a time before Robert Downey Jr’s version back in 2008.