Tim Burton’s Batman Returns Catwoman Spin-Off Would Have Been a Black-and-White ’40s Movie Homage

Tim Burton’s Batman universe could have been much larger than two movies, with the director at one time having his sights set on a second sequel to his 1989 hit, and a spin-off from 1992’s Batman Returns focusing on Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman. It seems that when it comes to the latter of these, Burton had some very specific ideas of what he wanted the return of Selina Kyle to look like, and it involved paying homage to a black-and-white movie from the 1940s.

While appearing at a Los Angeles screening of Batman Returns, the movie’s screenwriter Daniel Waters shared a little more information about what the Catwoman spin-off would have looked like if it had ever been made, and how his vision was somewhat different to that of Burton. As per IndieWire, Waters explained:

“He wanted to do an $18 million black and white movie, like the original Cat People, of Selina just lowkey living in a small town. And I wanted to make a Batman movie where the metaphor was about Batman. So I had her move to a Los Angeles version of Gotham City, and it’s run by three asshole superheroes. It was The Boys before The Boys. But he got exhausted reading my script.”

While we will never see what either version of the proposed Batman Returns spin-off would have looked like, Waters went on to explain how there was one aspect of making Burton’s second Batman movie that led to a lot of backlash from fans.

Related: Why Batman Returns is a Great Christmas Movie

Did Batman Returns Base Its Story on the Comics?

In short, no, it didn’t. In fact, according to Waters, the whole process of writing the movie was bizarre in that neither he nor Burton knew very much about the legacy of Batman in the world of DC comics and just set about making up their own version of two of the franchise’s most iconic villains. Waters continued:

“It was a weird assignment in that I didn’t need to please anyone but Tim Burton. Before the internet, you didn’t have to go before a tribunal and say what you were doing — it was just two guys in a room riffing. We didn’t know sh-t about Batman villains. We didn’t really understand the whole comic book thing. I just found out DC Comics stands for Detective Comics. The whole thing about Batman Returns is we got attacked by Batman fans because they thought, ‘This is only the second Batman movie, what the f-ck are you doing? You’re already going off-road. Now there’s like 50 Batman movies, it’s like, ‘Hey. That was pretty interesting.’”

Of course, Tim Burton’s Batman movies are still loved by many fans, but as per a famous line from the movie says, things change. The world of Batman certainly does, and currently, Matt Reeves’ The Batman universe is delivering a much more grounded vision of the Dark Knight when compared to the festive fantasy of Batman Returns. In a few years, another iteration of Batman will join James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DCU in The Bold and the Brave, but as yet, we have little idea of what that version of DC’s iconic crime-fighter will look like.