When they were ready, the studio cast a wide net, developing a series of scripts from 1999 to 2002 based on everything from the animated TV series Batman Beyond to Frank Miller's legendary graphic novel Batman: Year One. (The latter was to be an especially down-and-dirty, hip collaboration between Miller and Requiem for a Dream's Darren Aronofsky.) But after much chin stroking and soothsaying, Horn and then president of worldwide production Lorenzo di Bonaventura settled on a radical, even dangerous, strategy. They greenlit Batman vs. Superman.
It was an interesting idea. The story — cooked up by Seven's Andrew Kevin Walker and polished by Oscar winner Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) — reportedly had the two superheroes battling after Batman blames the Man of Steel for the death of his fiancée, only to see the rivals reunite and take on evil by the end. Done right, the movie had the chance to be a glorious twofer, rebooting both franchises at once and making scads of money. Done wrong, and the fallout would make all that fuss over Bat nipples seem quaint.
So in the summer of 2002, when Alias creator J. J. Abrams handed in the first 88 pages of a separate Superman script the studio had assigned him to work on, people took notice. Horn called in a 10-member blue-ribbon panel — including creative, marketing, and merchandising execs — to determine which screenplay was the better bet. Given the quality of the script and the less risky nature of the project, it wasn't exactly a surprise when Abrams won. But the aftermath got a little ugly. Di Bonaventura resigned. Commissioned to fill the hole left by Batman vs. Superman in Warner's 2004 summer slate, Catwoman turned out to be a hair ball. And the studio still didn't have a clue about how to make another Batman.
That's when Horn and Robinov took a meeting with a young guy named Christopher Nolan. Insomnia had come out that summer, and Nolan had been sweating blood over a Howard Hughes biopic that was to star Jim Carrey — a project he'd been toiling away at for a year. ''It was a tough script to write, but I cracked it in the last two weeks,'' says the 34-year-old director, with a trace of melancholy. ''It's one of the best things I've ever written.'' There was just one problem: It was becoming increasingly clear that Martin Scorsese's Hughes movie was going to shoot first. So Nolan tabled his script and made his pitch. He told Warner Bros. that if he was going to make Batman, it wouldn't be sweepingly gothic like Burton's or cartoonishly campy like Schumacher's. His Batman would be grounded in the real world and play to the twisted psychology of Bruce Wayne. It would be an original story that would answer the question: What kind of man puts on a bat costume and goes around fighting crime?
''I mean, he's just a regular guy who does a lot of press-ups,'' says Nolan. ''He makes himself extraordinary through force of will. I talked to the studio about what they wanted to do with Batman and what I wanted to do, and the two things coincided.''
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