Joe Dante talks what his Batman movie would've been...

[BatmAngelus]

Recently Gremlins director Joe Dante confirmed that he was considering directing the Tom Mankiewicz draft and mentions here that he was thinking of casting John Lithgow as The Joker:

Tom Mankiewicz's Batman sceenplay is one of the greatest unmade superhero movies of all time. The man who gave Superman: The Movie's legendarily difficult early drafts the polish that helped make it the timeless classic that it is (and who also wrote, co-wrote, or re-wrote the screenplays for James Bond adventures like Live and Let Die, Diamonds are Forever, and The Spy Who Loved Me) took a pass at Batman in the early 1980s, and one of the possibilities to direct it was Joe Dante (The Howling, Gremlins, Innerspace...oh, you know who he is!).

Dante passed on the movie, and it took several more years to actually get Batman to the big screen, by which point the project had changed hands so many times that Tom Mankiewicz's script was a thing of the distant past. Sam Hamm's script for Tim Burton's 1989 Batman movie bore no resemblance to Mankiewicz's, which was an extended origin story with similar pacing to the opening hour of Superman: The Movie (complete with a "first night on the job" sequence for Batman), multiple villains (both Joker and Penguin are present), and absurd, Bond-esque set pieces for the climax.

So imagine what that movie would look like had it been directed by Joe Dante. Dante was approached for the director's job, and he was initially interested, but ultimately turned the job down. "It was very outlandish," Dante says of Mankiewicz's Batman script, which he correctly describes as "not Chris Nolan-dark" but "darker than the [1960s Adam West] TV version."

But he did give it a little thought, particularly who he would have wanted to play The Joker. "I wanted to hire John Lithgow for that part because I had met him on The Twilight Zone movie," Dante said. "And for whatever reason, I started to gravitate more towards The Joker than towards Batman. And I actually woke up one night and I said to myself, 'I can't do this movie—I'm more interested in The Joker than I am in Batman, and that's not the way it should be.'" Dante turned the job down shortly after, admitting, "I think I was not the right guy to do the movie."

His John Lithgow comments put the timeline on this right around 1984, perhaps when he was at the peak of his powers with Gremlins, Explorers, Innerspace, and the wonderful The 'Burbs. For your "Lithgow as The Joker" image, keep in mind that he turned in a gloriously bonkers performance as Dr. Emilio Lizardo in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension in 1984.

Dante has no regrets about it, though. "I don't regret not doing Batman, in the sense that I'm not sure what it would have ended up being like. But I certainly can't say it was a major career-booster, my decision not to make it."

[GoNerdYourself]

Lithgow would have been an interesting choice. He is a great actor and can act a number of personalities, but he does crazy very well.

[riddler]

I love both Gremlins movie but I'm not sure Joe Dante would have been the best choice for Batman at the time for the reasons he himself admits.

Even for a monster movie, the Gremlins films probably focus more on the villains than any film I've seen. The heroes have their moments, because these films focused on multiple monsters instead of just one, they allow for the heroes to have small victories throughout the films much the way superheros do but rather than show the protagonists fight the villains, most of the film is showing the Gremlins do their thing (which is not a bad thing). So I suspect his type of film would likely focus more on the Joker wreaking havoc than Batman saving him. Also Gremlins 2 lampooned sequels as well as the first film because Dante wanted to spoof the industry; It's understandable why, Gremlins 2 was made after the decade of the sequel boom and specifically the era most common for cash grab sequels ending up being significantly inferior to the original.  We may very well have gotten a Batman and Robin type film much earlier had Dante been in charge although I'm sure he would have been more deliberate than Joel Schumacher had he gone that route.

One good thing about Joe Dante is he gets down to business and doesn't add in pointless plotlines. Once the mogwai turn into gremlins, the central focus on the film becomes stopping the Gremlins. He definitely has fun with his films so they wouldn't have turned out anything like Nolan's films. I'm sure Lithgow would have been outstanding. I wonder if Batman himself would have become dark because of how well Dante handles villains? At one point in the devlopment stage of Gremlins, Gizmo was supposed to become a gremlin and the central antagonist. Steven Speilberg convinced Dante to create a new character (Stripe) to be the main antagonist and keep Gizmo as a protagonist  for the entire film (allowing him to be used as a villain in the next film). For this reason we probably wouldn't have seen Robin in a big role.


One interesting piece of trivia; in the second gremlin film, a hybrid Gremlin with bat DNA breaks through a wall clearly leaving the shape of the Batman 89 logo.

[thecolorsblend]

It's really hard for me to conceive of what a Batman movie in the early or mid 80's might've been simply because a lot of Baby Boomers who watched Adam West as a kid might not have fully grasped Batman. Even Tim Burton never completely got over the Adam West hump. That legend loomed large, especially in the 80's.

In the end, the Dante thing sounds interesting but I really don't like how it might have harmed the character in the long run.