Tales From Development Hell (36 page)

Where all this left the Batman franchise was unclear. Almost anyone, it seemed, was invited to apply for the vacancy of the next film’s screenwriter, and even Grant Morrison, author of one of the biggest selling graphic novels of all time,
Arkham Asylum,
threw his hat into the ring. “My own movie agent at Creative Artists Agency submitted a treatment I’d entitled
Batman: Year Zero,
which had a young Batman travelling around the world, slowly assembling the familiar components of his outfit and disguise in the year before returning to Gotham as its protector.” As a change from The Joker or the Penguin, Morrison’s villains were Ra’s al-Ghul and Man-Bat from Denny O’Neil’s widely acclaimed Batman stories of the 1970s. Although Morrison’s application was unsuccessful, the team which was assigned the restoration of the Bat-franchise evidently agreed with his approach, electing to return to Batman’s roots as part of their restoration effort.

It was in early 2003 that Warner Bros revealed the new curator of the Bat-franchise: Christopher Nolan, director of the tricksy
Memento
and a well-received remake of Scandinavian thriller
Insomnia.
“All I can say is that I grew up with Batman,” Nolan commented. “I’ve been fascinated by him and I’m excited to contribute to the lore surrounding the character. He is the most credible and realistic of the superheroes, and has the most complex human psychology. His superhero qualities come from within. He’s not a magical character.” Although
Variety
also reported that both
Year One
²
and
Catwoman
— the latter scripted by John Rogers
(The Core),
starring Ashley Judd (later to be replaced by Halle Berry) and directed by visual effects veteran Pitof — were also on the cards, Nolan’s untitled Batman project
³
seemed the most likely to move forward, although it remained unclear which script would form the basis of the film. Nolan, who knew Batman but was uncertain about his wider comic book context, turned to David S. Goyer, who scripted
Dark City, The Crow: City of Angels,
the comic book adaptation
Blade
and its sequels, and unused drafts
of
Freddy vs Jason,
for help with the script. Ironically, Goyer, whose lifelong dream had been to write a Batman movie script, was unavailable, preparing to direct
Blade: Trinity
— but agreed to give Nolan some ideas
pro bono.
As Goyer recalls, “I said, ‘If I did do it, this is what I would do, and you can have my ideas for free.’ I talked for about an hour and spitballed a large amount of what the film is, and Chris said, ‘Wow, that sounds great.’ He went away again for a few more days, [then] I got a call saying, ‘You have to do this.’” Goyer carved out the time to write the first draft of the script.

The Nolan-Goyer Batman set out to achieve something no comic book or film had accomplished thus far: tell a definitive origin story, charting the journey from the murder of young Bruce Wayne’s parents all the way to the formation of Batman as a masked vigilante. Drawing heavily on the comic book history of the character, Nolan and Goyer filled in the blanks, working with Nolan’s regular production designer Nathan Crowley to build a Batman story from the ground up — exactly the approach which Warner Bros wanted to re-boot its biggest property. Released on 5 June 2005,
Batman Begins
made just over $200 million at the US box office — fifty million dollars (and a few million audience members) short of Burton’s
Batman,
but a healthy start to what would, with
The Dark Knight
(2008) and
The Dark Knight Rises
(2012) signal the return of the bat to box office dominance — not only among its comic book peers, but Hollywood in general. Sixteen years since Tim Burton’s
Batman
gave birth to the film franchise and Joel Schumacher’s
Batman and Robin
killed it off, the Dark Knight had returned — with a vengeance.

_____________

1
The fact that Peters could wonder why audiences might want to see superheroes fighting arguably shows the
Batman
producer’s failure to understand one of the greatest appeals of comic books.

2
Batman: Year One
would eventually be made as a direct-to-video animated feature, released in October 2011.

3
Batman Begins
was famously filmed under the codename
The Intimidation Game,
which many fans mistook as the actual title of the new Bat-film

“We should have made a better movie.”

—
Tomb Raider
producer Lloyd Levin

C
omputer and video games have never made the best source for movies; whether commercially successful or not, they are, almost without exception, reliably awful. Of course, since Hollywood is a business rather than an artistic endeavour, this has not prevented producers from going big game hunting, trying to turn a profit by turning video games into big screen blockbusters.

Although the computer revolution inspired such films as
Tron, The Last Starfighter
and
WarGames,
the first brand name computer game conversion did not appear until 1993’s
Super Mario Bros,
in which Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo gamely stepped into the shoes of Nintendo’s Italian plumbers, who had taken the gaming world by storm in the mid-1980s. Although the film failed to repeat the console game’s success, big-screen adaptations of
Double Dragon
and
Street Fighter
soon followed, and in 1995, British director Paul Anderson’s movie adaptation of the smash hit ‘beat-em-up’ game
Mortal Kombat
scored a phenomenal opening weekend, despite the universal derision the film received from critics. One would expect such a success to drive Hollywood executives to begin raiding arcades and game stores for ideas — but, aside from a rash of animated and/or direct-to-video releases, from
Pokémon
to
Sonic the Hedgehog
and
Tekken,
the 1990s produced only three
other live-action video game adaptations: a
Mortal Kombat
sequel, a Japanese
Fatal Fury
film, and an ill-starred adaptation of the popular
Wing Commander
PC game.

The thinking behind such an enterprise was simple: not only did brands like
Super Mario Bros
and
Mortal Kombat
have a ready-made international fan base, the properties tended to appeal most to Hollywood’s most highly prized demographic: young males. If you played computer games, the logic went, you probably also went to the cinema, and vice versa — a theory borne out by the vast number of hit movies, from
Ghostbusters
to
Goldeneye,
converted into successful console games. One persistent problem, however, was that video gamers were a notoriously fickle bunch, even in the late 1990s, and by the time a movie adaptation reached the screen, a new game — or even a new console — had reached the shelves. Suddenly,
Sonic the Hedgehog
looked about as cutting edge as
Pong.
Eventually, the studios wised up and decided to wait for a gargantuan global gaming success before swooping in for the movie rights. Finally, in November 1996, a star was born, as the mostly male gaming population got its first female hero. Lara Croft was her name. And
Tomb Raider
was her game.

The brainchild of Simon Channing-Williams, Lara Croft was conceived at the offices of Eidos Interactive in early 1995, and developed as a game by a team of Core Design programmers, including Toby Gard. Part James Bond, part Indiana Jones, part glamour model, the luscious Lara was a twenty-something British aristocrat-cum-adventurer who eschewed the life of a débutante in favour of self-financed expeditions in which she braved lethal traps, dangerous creatures and treacherous rivals in order to steal relics from ancient burial sites.

Lara made her console début in November 1996, in what was essentially a platform game, the platform in question being the PlayStation,
¹
Sony’s first entry into the risky but potentially lucrative console market, then dominated by Nintendo and Sega.
Tomb Raider
became an overnight success, propelling the pistol-packing virtual sex symbol Lara Croft to international stardom. Four sequels —
Tomb Raider II, Tomb Raider III: Adventures of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation
and
Tomb Raider Chronicles
— appeared year-on-year from 1997 to 2000, by which time Lara had become the most iconic figure in the history of console games, selling more than twenty million games worldwide, appearing on more than 200 magazine covers, advertising
products around the world, and appearing as the sole virtual entity on a Time Digital list of the fifty most important people in the cyber industry
and
a
Details
magazine list of the world’s sexiest women. In the adventures themselves, she had travelled the globe from the frozen ruins embedded in an Arctic glacier to a forgotten valley filled with supposedly extinct creatures in a South American rainforest. It was only a matter of time before she found her way to Hollywood.

Such was the success of the first
Tomb Raider
game that rumours of a movie began as early as March 1997, less than six months after Lara Croft’s début appearance. By September of that year, model turned actress Elizabeth Hurley became the first in a long line of actresses to be linked to the role, swiftly followed by such diverse names as Diane Lane, Sandra Bullock, Denise Richards, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Famke Janssen, Anna Nicole Smith, Demi Moore, Jennifer Lopez and Rhona Mitra, who dressed up as Lara at trade shows. Yet it was not until March 1998 that fan site The Croft Times broke the news: after one of the fiercest bidding wars in recent Hollywood history — for which, in a testament to the power of the brand, interested parties were required to come up with not just the money, but also ideas and approaches to the material — the film rights had finally been sold to Paramount Pictures.
Tomb Raider: The Movie
looked set to become more than virtual reality.

Making its official announcement a few days later, Eidos confirmed that it had entered into an agreement to license the worldwide film rights to Paramount, with plans to produce a live-action feature film, laying rest to rumours that the film might be computer-animated, like Pixar’s recently-released
Toy Story.
“Mr Lawrence Gordon and Mr Lloyd Levin will produce the action adventure,” the press release stated, referring to the prolific producers behind two
48 HRS
films, two
Die Hards
and two
Predators.
John Goldwyn, president of Paramount Motion Pictures, said, “We are thrilled by the possibilities of this film project. We are confident that the pairing of Eidos, a leading company in the cutting-edge world of video game (sic), and producers Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin, will result in a ground-breaking live-action adventure movie with worldwide appeal.” Paramount had good reason to put the movie on the development ‘fast track’, since its deal with Eidos stipulated that if the project did not move through development at a certain pace, the rights would automatically expire. Thus, by March, the studio had already hired a screenwriter: Brent V. Friedman, co-writer of the console-game inspired sequel
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.

Friedman’s first draft opens at a London boarding school in 1986 as sixteen year-old Lara, an expert gymnast and A-student, regales her classmates with vivid stories of her parents’ daring exploits. These are soon revealed to be products of her over-active imagination, since her parents (Lord Desmond and Lady Vivian Croft) are not globe-trotting relic hunters but vacationing souvenir collectors, who attempt to make up for years of neglect by offering to take Lara on holiday anywhere in the world. Lara’s choice, Tibet, turns out to be an unfortunate one: their plane crashes in the Himalayas, killing Lady Vivian and injuring Lord Desmond, whom she attempts to pull to safety on a makeshift sled-cum-stretcher. An attack by snow leopards gives audiences an early demonstration of Lara’s precocious resourcefulness, as she uses one of her trademark flares to chase away the predators — only for Lord Croft to expire in front of the gates of a monastery, where a Tibetan monk named Karak takes in the newly-orphaned girl. From here, the script leaps forward thirteen years to the Croft Estate in Hampshire, where an older, wiser Karak now serves as twenty-nine year-old Lara’s trainer, guardian and companion, like Batman’s Ra’s Al-Ghul and Alfred rolled into one.

Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, a grey-haired seventy year-old Scot named Darby Erikson, a role apparently tailor-made for a Sean Connery cameo, sends Lara a videotaped message, alerting her to his discovery of a map which he believes might lead to El Dorado, the fabled South American city of gold. Unfortunately, an unscrupulous Australian named Larsen (the name of the evil Texan from the first
Tomb Raider
game) is on his trail, and Erikson offers Lara a fifty-fifty split on the lost Incan gold, hoping to appeal to her charitable nature. Against Karak’s advice, Lara takes the job, but before she goes, she pays a visit to Stuart, Liam and Wesley, three engineering eggheads — dead ringers for
The X-Files’
Lone Gunmen — who build gadgets and gizmos from designs drawn up by Lara, with whom they are besotted. Before she can leave for Curaçao, where she must meet up with Darby, she returns home to find assassins prowling her estate, now inexplicably rigged with deadly traps. Of course, it’s soon revealed to be the work of Karak and the gardening staff — presumably all part of her training.