Bat Signal Declined: The Coen brothers’ cult detour from Gotham
The idea of the Coen brothers directing a Batman movie sounds vaguely preposterous these days. After all, can anyone really imagine what a vision of the Caped Crusader would look like with the kooky geniuses behind Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou, and Burn After Reading at the helm?
In truth, it seems unlikely that the Coens could have delivered the grim and gritty Batman the world has come to expect in the last four decades, but also would have been unsuited to a campy version that called back to the 1960s TV series.
Amazingly, though, the Coens were officially offered the chance to direct 1989’s Batman in the wake of the success of Raising Arizona, their rib-ticklingly bizarre 1987 screwball comedy starring Nicolas Cage. Indeed, if rumours are to be believed, Warner Bros offered the project to the brothers with no conditions, and a gargantuan budget to match.
Around this time, Warner had been trying to bring the Dark Knight to the big screen for over a decade with no success. At various times, directors such as Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters), Joe Dante (Gremlins), and Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street) were in the running for the director’s chair, but all fell by the wayside for one reason or another. In a weird parallel universe somewhere, Reitman’s Batman was probably made with Bill Murray under the cowl and Eddie Murphy running around in green pixie boots as Robin – and that might be even more absurd than a Coen Batman.
Naturally, though, none of these directors panned out, and when the project came the Coens’ way, the studio was getting increasingly desperate. In hindsight, if Warner had approached the Coens’ buddy Sam Raimi, of The Evil Dead fame, he would likely have jumped at the chance to direct Batman. After all, he spent much of the ’80s trying to get the rights to make a film based on the pulp character The Shadow, a precursor to Batman, and later became the man who directed a phenomenally successful Spider-Man trilogy for Marvel.
Offering the movie to the Coens, though, was always a fool’s game, because they only want to direct films that are 100% pure, unfiltered Coen. The fiercely independent brothers, who have always written and directed their movies, had no interest in becoming blockbuster directors tasked with bringing another writer’s vision to the screen. So, they said, “No thanks” to Warner’s lucrative offer, and the studio hired Tim Burton instead after he impressed with his second feature, Beetlejuice.
What did the Coens make instead of Batman, though? Well, inspired by an image they dreamed up of “big guys in overcoats in the woods – the incongruity of urban gangsters in a forest setting,” the brothers concocted 1990’s Miller’s Crossing. This neo-noir tells the story of two rival mob outfits going to war in the Prohibition era, all while Gabriel Byrne’s Tom Reagan is stuck in the middle, desperately trying to play both sides against each other.
Writing and directing Miller’s Crossing appealed to the Coens so much more because, even though it was heavily inspired by film noir, hardboiled crime novels, The Godfather, and the French crime film Le Doulos, it was still their own original story. Even though Batman featured its own noir influence, with old-timey gangsters in hats and trench coats running around a Gotham City whose place in time is impossible to pinpoint, it still would have required them playing with someone else’s IP, and that would never do.
