File this one under films that once were but will never be. While promoting their new movie THE BOOK OF ELI, the Hughes Brothers reminisced about their once proposed take on Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, which finds Bruce Wayne a gruff old fogey forced to dust off the Batsuit when Harvey Dent shows back up on the scene.

Here's what Allen & Albert had to say about their vision of the film. "Three different Batman projects were presented to us over the years. The first time, it was 'The Dark Knight [Returns].' I remember how dark the comic book was. Batman was old. He had to rely more on his tools and other shit, and he was a decrepit, 60- or 70-year-old man in this comic book."

Let's play dream casting for a minute...who would you have cast as an elder Bruce Wayne? For my buck, you could do no better than Robert Redford as a decrepit Dark Knight. Well, the Hughes Brothers had someone a little more rough around the edges in mind.

"I remember saying to them [Warner Bros.] back then, 'We want to do this, and you should get somebody like Clint Eastwood to do it,'"

Clint Eastwood! Can you believe it? They could have called it THE GOOD, THE BATMAN AND THE UGLY FACE!

Despite how interesting this would have been to see, it never quite spread its wings. As the brothers explained, they told the studio that by giving them Bats, they would basically be killing the franchise. In other words, their vision wasn't quite what the studio would have wanted from a big comic book film. Furthermore, they said it was never "in their blood" to take on something like a BATMAN film, despite it being offered to them a few times, stating they are "not capable of delivering a corporate project like that."

Guess the Hughes' can join Darren Aronofsky's shelved BATMAN project, which was also canned by the studio for being too gritty, violent and off base from what they wanted. Then came along a guy named Christopher Nolan that said "Wait till they get a load of me," subsequently putting a smile on that face of everyone!

So, is this something you would have liked to see? A past-his-prime Batman played by a GRAN TORNIO-esque character? Or is this storyline better suited for the pages of a graphic novel and nothing more?

Source MTV