Following the failure of Batman & Robin, Warner Bros. had decided to keep Batman on hiatus and decide what their next silver screen adaptation for this character should be. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins had really reinvigorated this franchise, and many ideas had been looked at, and one was a Batman Beyond movie which was based on the animated series on Kids WB.
Writer, Boas Yakin had said that after directing Remember The Titans, his agent had said that he could direct a studio movie. Yakin then said that he wanted to make a Batman movie but the agent had taken him seriously and even set up a meeting with Warner Bros. Yakin had this to say:
“It was almost like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man but a little bit darker — a teenage, kind of futuristic, cyberpunk Batman thing.”
If you are not familiar, Batman Beyond, a continuation of Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures, was about a teen Terry McGinnis in Gotham City twenty years after Batman had been last seen. After having met an old Bruce Wayne who has spent his time being recluse, Terry dons the Batsuit.
While the live-action adaptation seems like it would have been a great blockbuster, it did not work out too well. After having worked on a script with Alan Burnett and Paul Dini for many months, Yakin had bailed on this project after he decided that he was not really interested:
“It might have really hurt my career. I went off and wrote the best script I ever wrote that never got made. But it was just one of those moments in time where you think you want to do something, and then you realize you don’t really want to do it, and for some reason, it’s on your IMDb page for the rest of your life.”
Batman Beyond was one of the projects that had been considered between Batman & Robin and Batman Begins. Although the animated series was off the air for almost 15 years, Batman Beyond is a fan favorite. This has continued on in three episodes of Justice League Unlimited and a few comic book series.