You don’t exactly have to be an ultra-attentive viewer to notice that the eerily empty Times Square of “I Am Legend” contains a huge billboard featuring Superman’s insignia nestled inside Batman’s crest. When the film came out in 2007, most moviegoers were probably perplexed by this advertisement. After all, we were less than a year away from the hotly anticipated release of “The Dark Knight.” Was this Easter egg hinting that the Man of Steel might be joining Nolan’s Bat-verse? Obviously, it was not.
No, this was actually a cheeky in-joke referencing the “Batman vs. Superman” project WB fast-tracked in 2001. Eager to get away from the high camp of Joel Schumacher’s “Batman & Robin,” the studio hired “Se7en” screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker to do something more in the vein of Frank Miller’s revisionist superhero yarn “The Dark Knight Returns.” It paired him with director Wolfgang Petersen, who’d just delivered for the studio with the 2000 blockbuster “The Perfect Storm.” Comic book fans were mostly fine with Petersen, but they were completely amped to see Walker bring his savagely dark sensibility to Batman. This could be the movie they initially thought they were getting with Burton’s “Batman.”
Sadly, it was not to be. Walker’s draft was, shock of shocks, too bleak and violent for WB execs, so it brought on Akiva Goldsman, who, despite having won the Academy Award for writing “A Beautiful Mind,” was still reviled by the geek community for being the credited screenwriter of “Batman & Robin.” His rewrite was good enough to get Johnny Depp and Josh Hartnett to play, respectively, Batman and Superman, but Petersen left the project to make “Troy,” at which point it all fell apart.
Goldsman’s draft can be found online under the title “Asylum,” and it reeks of creative compromise. I never read Walker’s draft, but I do know that it was set in a post-9/11 world and did not feature Robin. Had this “Batman vs. Superman” gone into production, it’s a virtual guarantee that “Batman Begins” would’ve never happened, which means Nolan would’ve followed up “Insomnia” with … “The Prisoner?” There’s also a chance WB, which wanted to keep him in house, would’ve gauged his interest on a standalone Superman movie after development on J.J. Abrams’ “Superman: Flyby” and Michael Bay’s brief flirtation came to nothing.
In any event, there is a universe in which Petersen’s “Batman vs. Superman” got made (and, yes, that billboard was “I Am Legend” writer Goldsman’s idea). You’d just have to risk a viral apocalypse that wiped out 90-percent of the population to see it.