In a different world, 1997's Batman & Robin would have been a masterpiece of cinema. George Clooney would have been hailed as the greatest Batman to ever hit the screen. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Uma Thurman would take home Best Supporting Actor and Actress Oscars respectively, and Joel Schumacher would be revered as the most extraordinary director in the history of cinema. Alas, in this world we know that Batman & Robin was more a monster piece of cinema than anything else. But what if maybe, just maybe, it was a success in every essence of the word? If that were indeed true, then we would have seen Batman Unchained. And it would have been Batman unhinged.

The project actually went pretty far, all things considered. Screenwriter Mark Protosevich was enlisted by Warner Bros. to meet with Joel Schumacher and begin work on a script for Schumacher's third entry in the Batman franchise. After all, like Batman Forever before it, Batman & Robin couldn't possibly fail. So the pair met, with Schumacher sharing his vision for the franchise. He wanted to take the franchise in a more serious direction, featuring a more psychologically complex Batman than what had been experienced before. It was a direction seemingly perfect for returnee Clooney, who showed some serious dramatic chops in ER and was just starting to find his footing in the movies. Protosevich set to work on a script, resulting in a 150-page first draft that captured Schumacher's desired direction as well as an opportunity to bring back characters from all the previous Batman films, including Tim Burton's first two entries. The script was shared with studio executives, and Protosevich waited for the feedback. And waited. And waited some more. Then the news that the whole project was being dropped, thanks to the poor response to Batman & Robin.

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'Batman Unchained's Storyline Was Ambitious

Batman (George Clooney) and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) stand together in Mr. Freeze's lair in a scene from Batman & Robin
Image via Warner Bros.

'Batman Unchained's story overall would be about Batman (George Clooney) learning to conquer fear and face the past. Like Batman & Robin, the film would have two villains from Batman's Rogues Gallery: Professor Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow, who seeks revenge against Bruce Wayne, and Harley Quinn, who has a major hate-on for Batman, with reason. She is, after all, the daughter of the Joker in the movie, and has it in for our hero for having taken her father away in the original 1989 film. After Crane learns Batman's secret identity, he and Harley band together to drive Batman insane and have him locked up in Arkham. Meanwhile, Batman and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) have parted ways after a rift forms between them. Towards the end, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Batman begins hallucinating that he is put on trial by the villains he'd faced in the previous films: Poison Ivy, Catwoman, The Riddler, Penguin, Two-Face, and the Joker. After snapping out of it, Batman would be reunited with Robin, and together they emerge victorious.

The hope, clearly, was that Batman & Robin would be so successful that Warner Bros. would throw money at Batman Unchained like it was going out of style. It's the only way that the envisioned cast could have possibly been brought together on the project. The villains from the previous films, the ones appearing in Batman's hallucinatory vision, would have been played by the original actors. Thurman's Poison Ivy, Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze, Tommy Lee Jones' Two-Face, Jim Carrey as the Riddler, Danny DeVito as the Penguin, and the definitive Catwoman of the big screen, Michelle Pfeiffer. The final confrontation during the trial would see Batman up against Jack Nicholson's Joker, a casting coup if ever there was one. As for the two main antagonists, Scarecrow - a brilliant and, apparently, satanic professor - was tailor-made for one Nicolas Cage, with Schumacher even going so far as to approach Cage on the set of Face/Off to gauge his interest in the role. Interestingly, the demise of the film marked the second time that Cage had been denied playing a DC Comics character on screen, with his Superman in the failed Superman Lives never seeing the light of day.

Harley Quinn Would Have Made Her Live-Action Debut In 'Batman Unchained'

Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn in The Suicide Squad
Image via Warner Bros. Pictures

Harley Quinn, the second of the two, was being set up as the breakout character of the film. Besides being the daughter of the Joker, a break from the established canon for the anti-heroine, Harley would be a toymaker in the film. Protosevich describes his vision of Harley as being "sadistic in a mischievous, fun sense." She would find redemption at the end of the film, allowing viewers to see the good person underneath her complex and conflicted personality. The name that was associated with the role was the front-woman of the band Hole and the widow of Kurt Cobain, rocker Courtney Love, reported The Hollywood Reporter. Despite the casting process never getting off the ground, Love and Protosevich did have a lunch meeting about the role. Of the meeting, Protosevich said, "I think she had heard about the possibility of Harley Quinn being in the new Batman and was thinking she would be good for it." It was an intriguing choice, given how Love had earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in The People vs. Larry Flynt.

A couple of elements from the script, coincidentally, did make their way into the film that would resurrect the franchise, Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. A scene that would have had Clooney's Bruce Wayne travel to Bali and enter a cave full of bats to show he has conquered fear is similar to when Christian Bale's Wayne stumbles upon a bat-filled cave of his own. In that film, the Scarecrow, played by Cillian Murphy, was a principal antagonist, as he would have been in Batman Unchained. Those two instances are the only nods that exist to the wildness that would have been Batman Unchained, the film that could have salvaged Schumacher's Batverse. Even the script hasn't made its way online, with only a few eyes ever having seen it. So all we know of it is what's been said by Protosevich and Schumacher, although it could live on in one's hallucinatory dreams.