Darren Aronofsky’s abandoned Batman movie has become one of those cinematic “what ifs” that fans and film historians love to revisit. Long before Matt Reeves put Robert Pattinson in the cowl, and even before Christopher Nolan reshaped Gotham with Batman Begins, the Pi filmmaker was attached to a gritty reimagining co-written with comic book legend Frank Miller. But as much as people continue to mourn the film-that-never-was, Aronofsky himself has now revealed that making the superhero movie wasn’t even really the goal.
On a recent appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Requiem for a Dream director explained why his interest in Batman was always more complicated than it seemed. As he put it:
