Eight years after the blunder that was 1997’s “Batman & Robin,” and after Warner Bros. almost made the much darker “Batman: DarKnight,” Christopher Nolan reinvented the character once again with “Batman Begins.” But that narrative misses a crucial part of the Batman cinematic saga. Namely, it fails to take into account that Schumacher initially had a much more somber and dramatic film in the can before the final cut of “Batman Forever” debuted. This version, known as the “Schumacher Cut” or the fan-made attempt at resurrecting it known as the “Red Book Edition,” delved deeper into Bruce Wayne’s psyche, exploring the depths of his ongoing trauma.
Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman explained in a making-of featurette, how “Forever” originally revolved around Bruce Wayne finding his father’s journal and discovering his parents wanted to stay home the night they were killed, only leaving the house because Bruce wanted to go to the theater. He added, “The whole movie was actually built around this kind of psychological reckoning […] It was a much more complex, really kind of fun, but much darker, version of the movie.”
As Forbes reported back in 2015, this longer cut of “Forever” would have seen Val Kilmer’s Bruce Wayne falling into a cave and being confronted by a bat, thereby igniting his lifelong quest to use its image as a tool to fight crime. In the theatrical release, this moment appears when Bruce Wayne and Nicole Kidman’s Dr. Chase Meridian are on a date and Wayne starts having memory flashes of running from his parents’ wake and falling into the cave. In the longer cut, this is explored further when an adult Wayne returns to the cave to confront his fear. Oddly enough, Nolan would return to almost this exact concept 10 years later.
