Hollywood history is littered with the corpses of unmade superhero movies, destined only ever to be mentioned when a franchise slips into decay and is looking for a fresh way to breathe life into Superman, Batman, Spider-Man or whichever masked titan has currently hit the skids. And so it is perhaps inevitable this week that we are once again locked in the DC mortuary, staring at what might have been if Tim Burton and Darren Aronofsky had been allowed to pursue their respective superhero visions in what now seems like another era entirely.

Few would argue that either the caped crusader or the man of steel is currently top of the DC tree, following the meat-headed, convoluted mess that was last year’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. But does that mean we are viewing Burton’s aborted mid-1990s pitch for Superman Lives, starring Nicolas Cage as the last son of Krypton, or Darren Aronofsky’s Batman: Year One, which would have cast Joaquin Phoenix as the dark knight in 2002, with rose-tinted x-ray vision?

Aronofsky, who revealed his preference for Phoenix during press interviews for his new film Mother! last week, believes his version of the caped crusader would have fit nicely into DC’s current thinking. “I think we were basically – whatever it is – 15 years too early. Because I hear the way they’re talking about the Joker movie and that was my pitch. I was like: We’re going to shoot in east Detroit and East New York. We’re not building Gotham.”

Like DC’s mooted Joker origins movie, which reportedly has Martin Scorsese himself on board as a producer, Batman: Year One would have taken its inspiration from hard-bitten 1970s crime cinema such as Mean Streets or Taxi Driver. “It was a hard R-rated Batman,” Aronofksy recently told First Showing. “What I pitched them was Travis Bickle meets The French Connection – a real guy running around fighting crime. No superpowers, no villains, just corruption.”

Year One also shares another factor in common with the Joker movie, in that it sounds an awful lot like a “what if” take on an iconic comic-book figure. Dispensing with canon, Batman himself was to be wrenched from the luxury of his family’s fortune at a young age and forced to grow up in poverty on the mean streets of Gotham. Instead of kindly old Alfred the butler, his father figure would have been “Big” Al, an African American car mechanic, while Selina Kyle (aka Catwoman) would have been presented as a black prostitute.

Year One, which would have been written by the author of the seminal 1987 graphic novel of the same name, Frank Miller, was put into development after 1997’s disastrous Batman & Robin almost destroyed the caped crusader’s big screen legacy. In spirit, it doesn’t sound too far removed from the Christopher Nolan trilogy that eventually replaced it in cinemas – Aronofsky had even discussed using Christian Bale as the dark knight. But Warner Bros execs balked at the idea of a spiky R-rated take with limited opportunities for merchandising, and the movie was never made.

If Aronofsky’s vision of a low-tech Batman might have upset certain purists, it sounds as if Tim Burton’s Superman Lives would have had hardcore fans of the Christopher Reeve-era weeping into their popcorn. Surviving footage of spindly, long-haired Nicolas Cage in his shiny, sculpted costume, combined with abandoned scripts, suggests we would have had to get our heads around an entirely new vision of Kal-El, one closer to hammy rock god than the taciturn blue-eyed titan of comic book lore.

Cage told EW this week: “I would offer that the movie that Tim and I would have made, in your imagination, is more powerful than any of the Superman movies. I didn’t even have to make the movie and we all know what that movie would have been in your imagination. That is the Superman. That is the movie. Even though you never saw it – it is the Superman.”

The Oscar-winning star of Leaving Las Vegas may well be right, but given Cage is best known for the kind of freewheeling melodrama that either supercharges the movies he appears in (see Werner Herzog’s Bad Detective: Port of Call New Orleans) or destroys them with pantomime overacting (the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man and other efforts), it is hard to guess which way Superman Lives might have gone.

We should probably bear in mind that this version of Superman – certainly in early drafts during the period in which it was titled Superman Reborn – is probably the strangest one ever pitched. At one point, the man of steel is killed off (by Doomsday) and resurrected as a spirit, which then impregnates Lois Lane. The newspaper reporter soon gives birth to a son, who grows to man-size in just three weeks and subsequently takes on the mantle of his dear old dead Superdad.

Kevin Smith loves to tell the story of how he was forced to include producer Jon Peters’ obsession with the idea of Superman fighting a giant spider in his own version of the script. In the pantheon of messed-up comic book movie concepts, Superman Lives sits below only the abortive JJ Abrams-scripted take on Superman, which featured a Lex Luthor who can fly and a Krypton that never blew up.

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There are two ways to look at these lost scripts for alternate versions of our greatest superheroes. In the cinematic universe era, which seems to be slowly getting picked apart due to the short-termism of many Hollywood studios, they would have made no sense whatsoever. But if Warner is on its way to abandoning the joined-up approach, as appears to be the case, for a “what if” template, then all options are suddenly on the table. What if Superman were a

“psychologically traumatised” man of steel, and “what if” Batman grew up outside Wayne Manor and never had the greenbacks to buy all the hi-tech body armour and cool sonar gadgetry of the Nolan movies? In the comics and animated movies all these versions have walked the Earth – indeed there exists a critically-acclaimed, Mark Millar-penned take on the man of steel in which he is retooled as a Soviet totem, and versions of the caped crusader who are Nazis, vampires and even a cape and cowl-sporting toddler named Bat Baby.

There is a scene in the excellent Lego Batman Movie in which Batman rifles through the many costumes worn by the different versions of the dark knight over the years. On current evidence, Bruce Wayne is going to need a much longer clothes rail by the time the movie’s sequel goes into production.