A Batman Forever Deleted Scene Was Perfected By Christopher Nolan In Batman Begins
In the mid-90s, Michael Keaton decided to walk away from Batman after finding himself at odds with new franchise director Joel Schumacher. The "Lost Boys" director was brought in to replace Tim Burton after "Batman Returns" veered a little too sharply into Burton territory, and Keaton wasn't having it.
The actor, who'll soon return as Batman in "The Flash," had started out perfectly aligned with Burton's vision of a grim, brooding take on Batman. But as he told the In The Envelope podcast, his meeting with Schumacher cemented his exit from the franchise after the director allegedly said, "I don't understand why everything has to be so dark and everything's so sad," and Keaton responded with, "Wait a minute, do you know how this guy got to be Batman? I mean, it's pretty simple."
So Warner Bros. and Schumacher drafted a new Batman in the form of Val Kilmer, who ironically ended up clashing with the director anyway. after struggling with the Batsuit and realizing that Batman was basically a blank slate that any decent actor could play. Nonetheless, "Batman Forever" was a hit in 1995, and Schumacher was given the green light for a sequel almost immediately, resulting in the nauseatingly campy "Batman & Robin," proving why Keaton was right to depart when he did.
But things didn't have to get so silly and light-hearted. In fact, there was a much darker 170-minute cut of "Batman Forever" that never saw the light of day, which would have preserved some of the gloominess of Burton's Batman outings. The existence of the Schumacher Cut is well-known among fans, but what's not as widely appreciated is the fact that Christopher Nolan actually perfected a scene that was originally intended to appear in "Batman Forever."
Batman Forever's hidden history
Eight years after the blunder that was 1997's "Batman & Robin," and after Warner Bros. almost made the much darker "Batman: DarKnight," Christopher Nolan reinvented the character once again with "Batman Begins." But that narrative misses a crucial part of the Batman cinematic saga. Namely, it fails to take into account that Schumacher initially had a much more somber and dramatic film in the can before the final cut of "Batman Forever" debuted. This version, known as the "Schumacher Cut" or the fan-made attempt at resurrecting it known as the "Red Book Edition," delved deeper into Bruce Wayne's psyche, exploring the depths of his ongoing trauma.
Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman explained in a making-of featurette, how "Forever" originally revolved around Bruce Wayne finding his father's journal and discovering his parents wanted to stay home the night they were killed, only leaving the house because Bruce wanted to go to the theater. He added, "The whole movie was actually built around this kind of psychological reckoning [...] It was a much more complex, really kind of fun, but much darker, version of the movie."
As Forbes reported back in 2015, this longer cut of "Forever" would have seen Val Kilmer's Bruce Wayne falling into a cave and being confronted by a bat, thereby igniting his lifelong quest to use its image as a tool to fight crime. In the theatrical release, this moment appears when Bruce Wayne and Nicole Kidman's Dr. Chase Meridian are on a date and Wayne starts having memory flashes of running from his parents' wake and falling into the cave. In the longer cut, this is explored further when an adult Wayne returns to the cave to confront his fear. Oddly enough, Nolan would return to almost this exact concept 10 years later.
Batman Begins realized what Keaton and Schumacher couldn't
With "Batman Begins," not only would Christopher Nolan fully realize a concept from "Batman Forever," he would finally do what Michael Keaton initially envisioned for that third Batman movie. As Keaton told Marc Maron on his WTF podcast, when he initially started talking to Warner Bros. about a follow-up to the weird experiment that was 1992's "Batman Returns," he envisioned an origin story. He explained, "I said, 'You want to see how this guy started. We got a chance here to fix whatever we kind of maybe went off, this could be brilliant.'" Of course, Warners passed on the origin story idea and opted to continue the Burton films timeline with Schumacher at the helm.
But when Nolan, a relatively new director at the time, was given the reins to the dormant Batman franchise in the early 2000s, he would revive the origin story approach, successfully rebooting the series with a more realistic take on the central character that convincingly conveyed why a man might want to don a Batsuit and wage war on Gotham's criminals.
Interestingly, "Batman Begins" included a scene oddly reminiscent of the one in "Batman Forever," where a young Bruce falls down a well into the caves beneath Wayne Manor and is attacked by a swarm of bats. Later, as Wayne starts to consolidate his Batman operation, he returns to cave much like Val Kilmer's Wayne would have about a decade earlier and confronts his fear. With Nolan's version, however, the whole thing feels much more tied to the central narrative, with the director telling a truly cohesive story about confronting fears that ties directly into Batman's origin story.
Nolan was following his own instincts
While Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins" found inspiration in other DC films, incongruously including Richard Donner's "Superman," and took cues from "Blade Runner," there's no indication any of the scenes in "Begins" were directly inspired by anything Schumacher ever did. In fact, Nolan was indirectly inspired more by Burton, who he said had left an "interesting gap in pop-culture," by never depicting Batman's origin story. Had Keaton gotten his way after "Batman Returns," the Batman-on-film timeline would have looked very different. But that can be said for multiple moments in the cinematic history of the character, as the Schumacher cut of "Batman Forever" shows.
One thing that's obvious, however, is that Nolan was pretty much following his own intuitions about what Batman needed in order to revive the franchise in 2005. While he clearly picked up on trends from the character's past, "Batman Begins" was a truly original take, which is part of the reason the director's "Dark Knight" trilogy has endured over the years. With "Begins," Nolan made fear the central theme, and there's no indication that would have been the case with Schumacher's alternate cut of "Forever," which seemed to focus more on guilt and repeating trauma, all while trying to balance that with its more outlandish elements such as Jim Carrey's Riddler and the general attempt to broaden the film's appeal. We'd still love to see an official version of the Schumacher cut though.