Before Val Kilmer put on the cape and cowl for 1995’s Batman Forever, Michael Keaton was set to play Batman for the third time. Keaton ended up pulling out of the project because he didn’t like the direction it was going (less dark, more colorful) and the rest is history. Keaton was a guest on the WTF Podcast with Marc Maron last week and talked about the direction he wanted the third Batman movie to go in. Surprisingly, it was very similar to Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins — Keaton wanted to explore Bruce Wayne’s origin story. Here’s a quote from the podcast:

“The guy who’s doing them now, Chris Nolan, he’s so talented, it’s crazy. [Christian Bale] is so talented. It’s so good.” he enthused. “But I say that like I’ve seen them, and I actually haven’t. I didn’t even see much of the second one that I did.” “You look at where he went, which is exactly what I wanted to do when I was having meetings about the third one,” he continued. “I said you want to see how this guy started. We’ve got a chance here to fix whatever we kind of maybe went off. This could be brilliant.”

That definitely would have been interesting… but it would have been strange to have Keaton in an origin story after he had already established himself as Batman in two previous films. Instead, we got Batman Forever followed by Batman & Robin, but maybe that was a blessing in disguise. Would we have got Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy without them? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

SOURCE: WTF Podcast [via Collider]