What happened?
So where did Bruce Wayne fail? Why didn't it happen? Before we look to the end of the story, we'll go backward a little bit, to the first pitch.
Tollin-Robbins Productions was approached by Tim McCanlies' agents the very weekend that The Iron Giant was released. He had something to pitch, and came in with the story of an American icon; a JFK Jr. kind of story. He laid out the whole thing. The character, his grandfather-type, his two-faced friends, the one cop in the city that he could trust, and the empire he was to inherit. The pitch was sait to be riveting by itself. At the end of the pitch, McCanlies revealed that the icon in question was none other than Bruce Wayne.
Tollin-Robbins bought it on the spot.
From the get-go there was question about whether a new television series and a movie franchise could blend seamlessly. An insider who was close to the project said that it seemed to work from a narrative standpoint. However, chiefs at the Warner Bros. movie studio insisted they'd be making another film, at that time rumored to be either Batman: Year One or The Dark Knight Returns, and they used that as an excuse as to why the show couldn't move forward. The WB network is said to have loved the idea and knew it would be their next big franchise, to pair with the then-new Buffy spinoff Angel. The movie division still wasn't budging.
On July 14, 2000, X-Men, a film based on the Marvel Comics group of super-hero characters, opened, and it made over $54 million in its opening weekend. Suddenly all chances of Bruce Wayne on television were shot dead.
The insider told us that Bruce Wayne tells the pre-Batman days of the character much like Batman Begins does, but with a major difference: Instead of the entire story being told in two hours, you'd have 100 hours more of seeing young Bruce getting his life together, but at the same time going down such a dark path that we're not sure if we're supposed to be rooting for him or against him. "Because the fans know that while an hour of seeing Bruce Wayne before he puts the mask on is great, what we really want to see are 22 hours of him. 44. 66. Would an hour of pre-boss Tony Soprano be anywhere near as captivating as 30 hours of pre-boss Tony? This is what the feature guys never got," the source said.
"The script was pure beauty," we were told. "The characters were all dead-on, but better. More fully realized and modernized than they had ever been before. The opening tease... an unidentified young man kicking the sh*t out of a jail cell full of street thugs, only to reveal Alfred at the end of it....could it possibly get better than that?"
The project didn't get far enough to go for serious casting, but an actor named Trevor Fehrman (Now You Know, Clerks 2) was considered for the role of Bruce, as was Shawn Ashmore (Bobby Drake/Iceman from the X-Men films). Michael Rosenbaum, later to be the iconic Lex Luthor, was once tossed around for the role of Harvey Dent. David Krumholtz (Numb3rs) was considered as a possible contender to play Jim Gordon.
Years later, when Smallville became a hit for the WB, attempts and pitches were made by Smallville's creators Gough and Millar to do Bruce Wayne as a companion show to their young Clark Kent series. They were denied. Chances for Bruce Wayne on television were turned into absolute nothing when a good writer - David S. Goyer - was teamed up with a noted director, Christopher Nolan. That team, with actor Christian Bale added to the mix, led us to Batman Begins, which hit theatres on June 15, 2005.
Tollin-Robbins Productions did eventually get a Batman-oriented television series on the screen: Birds of Prey, which premiered in 2002. Where Bruce Wayne was a prequel to the Batman of myth, Birds was a sequel, taking place in the future with the daughter of Batman and Catwoman teaming up with the former Batgirl to stop crime in New Gotham. Birds was limited in its use and mentions of the Caped Crusader, but the producers often fought and won, such as in the series pilot, where Batman and the Joker are actually seen. Unfortunately, Birds didn't catch on as well as Smallville did or Bruce Wayne would have done, and it ended after 13 episodes.
The ship for Bruce Wayne to work as a television series has now sailed away, now that Batman Begins quite adequately gives its version of Bruce Wayne's early years. But in 1999, when the Batman movie franchise was dead and the WB Network needed a hit, this project could have been one of the biggest comics-to-television successes to date. We can only speculate on how cool it really would have been.
Timeline
Here's a look at the timeline for the Bruce Wayne project:
* July/August 1999: Bruce Wayne pitched to Tollin-Robbins Productions
* December 1999: Word starts to leak out that a "Young Bruce Wayne" TV series is on the way for the WB Network. The network is said to be "thrilled."
* December 24, 1999: Ain't It Cool News reports a tug-of-war between the Warner Bros. movie studio and the television arm. AICN's Harry Knowles refuses to get behind either project, since he hasn't read any scripts.
* January 4, 2000: Knowles reads and reviews the Bruce Wayne pilot script. His response is positive.
* January 29, 2000: The Hollywood Reporter states that the television series is on hold while decisions are being made about the movie franchise. Darren Aranofsky (Pi) is currently attached to the movie project.
* July 14, 2000: The theatrical X-Men makes $54 million on its opening weekend; the movie division becomes determined to get out a new Batman film. At this moment, Bruce Wayne is dead.
* September 15, 2000: Stax at IGN Filmforce posts his review of the series pilot script.
* Late September, 2000: The WB Network announces their "teenage Clark Kent project."
* June 15, 2005: Nearly five years after the release of X-Men, and eight years after the last Batman movie, it is finally time for the Dark Knight to return, in Batman Begins, a prequel that starts with the early days of young Bruce Wayne.
Note:This feature (and the previous parts(pilot script,outline)) was published in 2005)
Source:Gotham Clock Tower
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Bruce Wayne:Timeline-What Happened?
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