What if Darren Aronofsky had directed Batman instead of Christopher Nolan?

One of the dedicated cinephile's favorite hobbies is contemplating the movies that might have been. Because the Hollywood development process is so fickle, prone to prevailing box-office winds, rising and falling trends, and the particular peccadilloes of people in power, the pages of movie history are littered with the corpses of promising films that simply fell apart.

David Hughes is one of our most esteemed writers of cinematic obituaries. His books The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made and Tales From Development Hell (out today in a newly revised edition) are entertaining and detailed deconstructions of what went wrong with the movies you'll never get to see. We've assembled a few of the most intriguing movies-that-could-have-been from Tales, along with a handful of titles contributed by the author himself.

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Image credit: DC Comics/Hanna-Barbera/Wikimedia

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