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Even though fans have become accustomed to seeing a new version of Batman hit the big screen every few years, the iconic superhero’s first live-action outing spent an eternity in development hell before Tim Burton came along and delivered his Gothic spin on the Gotham City mythos with Michael Keaton under the costume.
Prior to that, almost every big-name actor in Hollywood had been considered for the role, with Pierce Brosnan famously turning it down. However, the project wasn’t always designed as being a serious adaptation of the source material, with Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman once attached to helm a comedic version that was much more indebted to Adam West than Frank Miller.
Bill Murray was being eyed for the Caped Crusader, with fast-rising comedy star Eddie Murphy under consideration for Robin. It would have been something to behold, that’s for sure, but Murray recently opened up to Yahoo! Entertainment about why it never came together.
“I talked to Eddie Murphy about it, and Eddie wanted to play Batman. That’s as far as that conversation went. I don’t wanna be the Boy Wonder to anybody. Maybe much earlier when I was a boy. But it was too late for that by the ’80s. Also, I couldn’t do the outfit. Eddie looks good in purple, and I look good in purple. In red and green, I look like one of Santa’s elves. There was just a lot of vanity involved in the production. It wasn’t gonna happen.”
As much as we’d have loved to see 1980s-era Murray and Murphy at the height of their powers bringing Batman and Robin to theaters for the first time ever in a major studio film, we’re more than happy with how things turned out in the end.
The LEGO Batman Movie showed that stories focused on the Dark Knight aiming for laughs can work, but Burton’s comic book classic is without a doubt one of the most influential and important blockbusters of the modern era that helped shape the entire genre as we know it today.