After Ben Affleck’s failure, can Arkham Asylum ever work in a Batman movie?

Gotham City’s Serious House on Serious Earth will not be a Serious Movie, unfortunately. IGN reports that Arkham Asylum was set to appear in Ben Affleck’s solo Batman movie, before it all got sent to the scrap heap in favor of a new film starring Robert Pattinson as the caped crusader.

IGN has it that the main theme of Affleck’s movie — he was poised to direct as well as star — would have been the idea of sanity versus insanity. The full name of Arkham Asylum is the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, and it would have made a perfect setting, particularly seeing as it hasn’t been used to its full potential in any of the Bat-movies thus far.

Sure, it shows up for a bit of cartoony fun at the end of Batman Forever, and we don’t talk about Batman & Robin at all. It’s in Batman Begins, where it’s Scarecrow’s workplace and laboratory of evil, but it’s not as menacing as comic fans know it can be.

Perhaps Joker, the upcoming movie with Joaquin Phoenix as the clown prince of crime, will do something with it. Although it’s Arkham State Hospital here, you can see its name prominently featured in the trailer. It even looks like that’s where Arthur visits for some outpatient psychiatric help:

But Joker isn’t a Batman movie, per se, despite it being about Batman’s greatest nemesis. From what we know, Bruce Wayne still has his parents, so he’s not going to be a Bat-factor unless this movie gets really weird. (Well, unless it gets weirder than it already looks. This is not meant as an insult.)

We’re talking about Arkham being a factor in a movie where the Dark Knight suits up and has to actually visit the most famous asylum in comics. Rocksteady Studios used the place effectively in the video game Batman: Arkham Asylum, where the horror comes from the fact that no matter how far you wander off the beaten path, you’re ultimately trapped in a Gothic nightmare of a building you must move through in order to play the game. But that feeling would be hard to replicate onscreen.

The claustrophobia of the place could be captured on film, but it would require some vision to make it a cinematic dark night (pun not intended) of the soul. Classic comics stories like Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth do not lend themselves well to adaptation. It would take a commitment to adult storytelling to make it work.

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Could Affleck have done something worthwhile with Arkham? Perhaps. If Joker — which is poised to kick off a new universe of DC movies outside the official DCEU possibly called DC Black — is a success, it could make all the difference. DC Black, if it comes fruition, would involve more “experimental” projects, and movie set in Arkham would fit right in.

Let DC get weird and go to the madhouse, says I, so long as it gets to really go there.

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