In a matter of a few years, Harley Quinn has become one of Warner Bros. & DC Studios’ biggest assets, and soon we will see a new version of the character in Joker: Folie à Deux with Lady Gaga portraying her. This will be the second live-action version after the one we saw in Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey, and The Suicide Squad, but it could have been the third if a movie that was in development with Joel Schumacher as the director had come to fruition.
As you well know, after the release of Batman Forever, which was a box office success, Warner Bros. greenlit a Batman & Robin with George Clooney donning the Gotham vigilante suit, which was seen as a complete disaster by the audience and did not perform spectacularly at the box office. However, the film studio was convinced that it was going to be a new hit at the box office and started working on another movie.
A very different Harley Quinn than we remember
This was immediately canceled after realizing that the audience had had enough of Warner Bros.’ excessive craziness with the Caped Crusader, but many details of the project eventually came to light, including the idea of adapting the character of Harley Quinn, who had only debuted a few years earlier in Batman: The Animated Series. However, her origin story would have been very different from the one presented in cartoons, movies, and comics, making Harley the Joker’s daughter, not his partner as we have always been told.
Harley would also not be a psychologist, but a toymaker who discovers who her real father was and embarks on a path of revenge against Batman, teaming up with Jonathan Crane (Scarecrow) in a story where, also, Jack Nicholson would have returned as the Joker to torment Bruce Wayne in a series of hallucinations. In other words, a bit like Batman: Arkham Knight, where the clown prince occasionally appears in Gotham.
Schumacher sought to unite all the franchise villains in this movie, including those of Michael Keaton and Tim Burton
The script for this Batman: Unchained would have been written by Mark Protosevich (I Am Legend) and not by Akiva Goldsman, with whom Schumacher worked on the previous films, and would have presented Bruce learning to overcome fear and confronting the demons of the past in a story where Robin would have a small role, but not Batgirl, and that would have served as a grand finale to the saga initiated in 1989 by Tim Burton and Michael Keaton under the cape of Batman, featuring cameos from Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones), Riddler (Jim Carrey), Penguin (Danny DeVito), and even Michelle Pfeiffer (Catwoman).
Batman & Robin.
Returning to Harley Quinn, the character would have achieved some kind of redemption in the film, and is described as a mischievous and fun person. We do not know who would have played her as the project was canceled when the script was about to be delivered to Warner Bros. in draft form, but we could have expected a very flamboyant interpretation, in line with this Gotham of dazzling neon lights created by Joel Schumacher.
We will never know if this film, which Mark Protosevich assures was much darker than what we had seen in Batman & Robin, could have revitalized the franchise, but somewhere in the multiverse it must exist, and who knows if it had been made, and if successful, it could have prevented us from seeing the masterpiece trilogy of The Dark Knight directed by Christopher Nolan.
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