Batman v. Superman lifted heavily from Frank Miller’s game-changing graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, meaning we will never see a full-on live-action adaptation of it, right? Not according to Zack Snyder.
The director of BVS said during a live-streamed commentary (via Vero) of his film on its fourth anniversary, per Screen Rant, he believes a faithful version of Dark Knight Returns could still happen and BVS doesn’t negate that.
Snyder would love to see some director tackle Miller’s story one day and he’s not the only one. HBO’s Watchmen producer Damon Lindelof told Collider in December he might be willing to take a crack at it on the condition he can work with Michael Keaton or Christian Bale:
“I think it would be really interesting to wait for somebody like, you know, Michael Keaton, who has already done Batman, or a Christian Bale 25 years from now and then do Dark Knight with them. So, it’s someone who we actually saw play a younger version of Batman. That would be rad.”
There are elements BVS did not incorporate so talk of a live-action feature is not out of line. Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne didn’t come out of retirement; there were no gangs of mutants, no straight slicer-dicers, and certainly no Batman on horseback.
We also never saw Joker, and Carrie Kelley was only hinted at in a cameo in the Knightmare sequence.
Dark Knight Returns received an animated adaptation in two parts back in 2012 and 2013 from Warner Bros. Animation. It starred the voice talents of RoboCop (one more character Frank Miller has written) star Peter Weller as Batman, Modern Family’s Ariel Winter as Carrie Kelly, and Human Target actor Mark Valley as Superman.
No Dark Knight Returns film is in the works that we know of but it could be intriguing to see how all aspects of the comic put together would translate to a live-action feature that tries to stay true to the source.
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