The sun is out, the Oscars statuettes have been shelved, and comic book movie season is upon us once more. Maybe you're still smarting from the disappointment of Batman v Superman, or maybe the wait for Captain America: Civil War is starting to make you a little loopy, but either way you've probably got capes on the brain.
At a time when it feels like superhero movies are all that's getting made, it's hard to remember the days when they still felt like a risk to studios. But it used to be a lot harder to get big-budget comic adaptations off the ground, much less at the pace Marvel and Warner Bros now churn them out. So here are six of the most promising comic book movies that never made it out of development hell.
1. Darren Aronofsky's Batman
Before Warner Bros hired Christopher Nolan to helm Batman Begins – and by extension create the groundbreaking Dark Knight trilogy – they were developing a very different version of the Caped Crusader with Requiem for a Dream director Darren Aronofsky.
Scripted by Frank Miller, who penned several of Batman's darkest comic book outings, this noir take on the superhero would have been a pretty radical reimagining of the mythology. Bruce Wayne is written as a traumatized, obsessive time bomb of a man, Selina Kyle is a dominatrix and Bruce's butler Alfred becomes a muscular mechanic by the ironic name of Little Al.
You can read more in-depth details about the Batman: Year One script over here.
What to Read Next
2. Nicolas Cage's Superman
Aka Tim Burton's infamous aborted Superman Lives from 1998, which is generally regarded as better off unmade. Originally written by Kevin Smith, this was Warner Bros' attempt to reboot Superman from the ground up, turning the mythology on its head much as Batman: Year One would have a few years later. But there were problems from day one – Smith and Burton didn't see eye-to-eye, and the script went through several troubled rewrites before the project was eventually cancelled, just three weeks before production was due to start.
For real insight into exactly what went wrong here, when so many of the right ingredients seemed to be in place, look no further than last year's insightful documentary The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened? Despite the ropey-looking costume tests for Nicolas Cage, the doc makes a decent case for how Superman Lives might have actually been something pretty revolutionary.
3. Joss Whedon's Wonder Woman
This one still stings. No matter how good Gal Gadot's solo Wonder Woman movie ends up being – she was, after all, one of the few bright spots in BvS – some part of us will always be in mourning for Joss Whedon's long-gestating, long-awaited, now long-dead version.
"She was very powerful and very naive about people," Whedon has said of his mooted origin story, which was announced in 2005 before stalling two years later. "The fact that she was a goddess was how I eventually found my in to her humanity and vulnerability, because she would look at us and the way we kill each other and the way we let people starve and the way the world is run and she'd be like, 'None of this makes sense to me'."
4. Edgar Wright's Ant-Man
Warner Bros and DC aren't the only ones with cancelled skeletons in their closet, although they certainly have the most. Marvel Studios hasn't as yet accumulated many high-profile aborted movies, but there's no doubt that the version of Ant-Man we saw on screen last year was very, very different than the one Edgar Wright planned to deliver.
Having spent several years developing the project alongside Joe Cornish, Wright dropped out in 2014 "due to differences in [his and Marvel's] vision of the film". Thanks to some speedy scrambling, Ant-Man still ended up being ready for its planned 2015 release slot, with Paul Rudd and Adam McKay (The Big Short) re-working the script to Marvel's liking.
Rudd has claimed that much of Wright's original tone was intact – "There's a lot that's already in there from what Edgar did, there's a lot of dialogue and character still in there" – but we'll never really know, and clearly the differences were extreme enough for Wright to bow out. Here's hoping for a tell-all book one day.
5. JJ Abrams's Superman
It's fair to say JJ Abrams now has a pretty strong track record when it comes to bringing beloved properties to the big screen, and given how Zack Snyder's DC tenure is turning out, it's hard not to feel a bit wistful for what could have been.
Way back in 2002, before Abrams was a big name Hollywood-wise, he was tapped by Warner Bros to write a draft of Superman: Flyby. Yes, you read that title correctly. Superman: Flyby had McG and Brett Ratner attached to direct at different stages, which didn't bode well for this origin story even with the Abrams pedigree.
Mr Sunday Movies has a pretty great rundown of the axed film's plot line in the video above, but suffice it to say it's pretty dark, and pretty weird, and involves ritual suicide. On second thoughts, maybe we're not that wistful.
6. George Miller's Justice League
Mad Max: Fury Road was pretty great. We can all agree on that, right? Even the Academy thought so, and they hate action movies.
But before the epic undertaking that was Fury Road, Miller was set to bring the Justice League to the big screen with a cast that would have included Armie Hammer as Batman, DJ Cotrona as Superman, and The OC's Adam Brody as The Flash. The script was online for a while and although it's now been removed, a few pieces of concept art released last year offered a glimpse at the visual style.
"George Miller's mind is so operatic and big and expansive, it's a shame that the world didn't get to see what he would do with superheroes," Cotrona has said. "It was allegorical, like a story of Greek gods almost. He was doing things with the Superman character and Batman character, and all the iconic favorites, that's never been done before. Watch Fury Road and you can only imagine what he would do with those iconic characters."
Emma Dibdin is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about culture, mental health, and true crime. She loves owls, hates cilantro, and can find the queer subtext in literally anything.
