Batman Returns was Tim Burton’s last outing with the Dark Knight, but before he was booted thanks to the backlash of parents, he had ideas for a sequel – Batman Continues – and a spinoff for Catwoman.
If Burton had his way, that film would have gone a different way than one of the writers on Returns imagined. “He wanted to do an $18 million black and white movie, like the original ‘Cat People,’ of Selina just lowkey living in a small town,” said Daniel Waters to IndieWire.
Cat People is a 1942 film noir thriller produced by Val Lewton, directed by Jacques Tourneur, and released by RKO that successfully capitalized on the success of The Wolf Man and Universal’s trendsetting run of horror pictures.
The main character Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) bore the curse of turning into a panther whenever she felt amorous – full moon or no full moon. This made it hard for her to keep a husband and so much as hook up with a part-time lover.
Selina wouldn’t likely have had the problem of turning into a creature of the night, but Burton could have tapped into something salacious in her love life while she started over away from Gotham. Waters saw things differently and wanted to do something instead that would have been far ahead of its time.
“And I wanted to make a ‘Batman’ movie where the metaphor was about Batman. So I had her move to a Los Angeles version of Gotham City, and it’s run by three asshole superheroes. It was The Boys before The Boys. But he got exhausted reading my script,” he said.
Waters explained his plot more clearly in Film Review magazine back in 1995. “After the traumas of the Batman Returns she has amnesia, and she doesn’t really remember why she has all these bullet holes in her body, so she goes to relax in Oasisburg,” he said via Den of Geek.
“What Gotham City is to New York, Oasisburg is to Las Vegas-Los Angeles-Palm Springs. [It’s a] resort area in the middle of the desert. It’s run by superheroes, and the movie has great fun at making fun at the whole male superhero mythos,” Waters continued.
“Then they end up being not very good at all deep down, and she’s got to go back to that whole Catwoman thing,” he added.
Both ideas for the script ultimately were dumped when the studio, Warner Bros., moved on with Joel Schumacher. Thus, Batman Continues became Batman Forever which begat Batman & Robin. They returned unwisely to the solo Catwoman idea with Halle Berry in 2004.
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