The Hollywood Reporter interviewed Frank Miller recently, and managed to ask him about a cancelled project with Darren Aronofsky.
Miller revealed that the project was too dark for Warner Brothers at the time and had this to say about it:
“It was the first time I worked on a Batman project with somebody whose vision of Batman was darker than mine. My Batman was too nice for him. We would argue about it, and I’d say, “Batman wouldn’t do that, he wouldn’t torture anybody,” and so on. We hashed out a screenplay, and we were wonderfully compensated, but then Warner Bros. read it and said, “We don’t want to make this movie.” The executive wanted to do a Batman he could take his kids to. And this wasn’t that. It didn’t have the toys in it. The Batmobile was just a tricked-out car. And Batman turned his back on his fortune to live a street life so he could know what people were going through. He built his own Batcave in an abandoned part of the subway. And he created Batman out of whole cloth to fight crime and a corrupt police force.”
It definitely sounds like a darkly intense venture and one can hope we can see this project come to life. Perhaps as a graphic novel, as The Hollywood Reporter suggests?