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Batman Would Have Tortured People in Aronofsky's Movie, Frank Miller Says

"My Batman was too nice for him," Miller says.

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New details on the Batman movie that Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky and Batman veteran Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns) were working on have now emerged. Miller tells The Hollywood Reporter that Aronofsky wanted to make some radical changes to how the Caped Crusader was seen in earlier movies, namely that he would have tortured people and turned his back on fortune to live in the streets.

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"It was the first time I worked on a Batman project with somebody whose vision of Batman was darker than mine," Miller said. "My Batman was too nice for him. We would argue about it, and I'd say, 'Batman wouldn't do that, he wouldn't torture anybody,' and so on."

Miller went on to say that he and Aronofsky worked on a screenplay together, for which they were paid "wonderfully," but Warner Bros. was not interested.

"Warner Bros. read it and said, 'We don't want to make this movie.' The executive wanted to do a Batman he could take his kids to. And this wasn't that," he explained.

Another potential problem is that their movie script didn't have a lot of merchandising opportunities.

"It didn't have the toys in it. The Batmobile was just a tricked-out car," Miller said. "And Batman turned his back on his fortune to live a street life so he could know what people were going through. He built his own Batcave in an abandoned part of the subway. And he created Batman out of whole cloth to fight crime and a corrupt police force."

We'll see Batman next on the big-screen in this month's Batman v Superman from Zack Snyder. Played by Ben Affleck, this version of Batman is having doubts about how successful he's really been at saving the people of Gotham.

In other Batman movie news, Christian Bale, who played the character in the Christopher Nolan-directed films, recently said he was not totally satisfied with his performance.

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