Whenever you’re asked which directors you’d love to see doing a Batman movie some day, if you don’t say Sam Raimi, you’re not doing it right.
Raimi, the visionary behind the Evil Dead series, Raimi blew the Superhero Erne wide open when he stepped up to direct Toby Maguire’s Spider-man movies – although especially with Spider-man 2 which is to this day almost untouchable – and most recently, he returned to the Marvel universe for the Doctor Strange sequel but with a character like Batman, Raimi could really let his dark side loose.
As we all know, the DC universe is getting a major overhaul with James Gunn and Peter Safran bringing us Superman: Legacy in two years and The Flash’s Andy Muschietti expected to bring Batman back to the big screen shortly after but Raimi has been lurking in the background, waiting for his chance to give us his vision for the Dark Knight Detective.
“I’ve always loved Batman,” the director said in 2022, adding “If I ever saw the Bat-Signal up in the air, I’d come running. If I heard that deep, gurgling laugh of The Shadow coming from the darkness, I would also tentatively step outside. And Spider-Man would be ahead of Doctor Strange, but I don’t want to put him down the list!”
Recently, on Twitter, a fan said he asked Raimi which villain he’d like to bring to the screen and his answer gave me goosebumps:
Ra’s Al Ghul, the Demon’s Head, is my long-time favourite Batman villain and even though he’s no stranger to the screen, with the late, great David Warner playing him in Batman the Animated series with Liam Neeson playing him in The Dark Knight Trilogy, Matthew Nable playing him in Arrow and Alexander Siddig stepping up in Gotham, but he is yet to be played with the gravitas he deserves.
In the comics, Ra’s is Batman’s greatest enemy and sometime ally, with the ability to keep himself alive indefinitely with his mystical Lazarus Pit, Ra’s’ daughter, Talia, is sometimes Batman’s greatest love and mother to his son and occasionally, Ra’s even helped train a young Bruce Wayne to be the champion he became as Batman.
Ra’s walks the world between natural and supernatural in the world of DC, feeling just as at home with Riddler and Bane as he does with Constantine of Etrigan the Demon… he’s my favourite Batman villain for a reason.
I can only hope that Gunn and Safran are aware of Raimi’s desire to travel to Gotham to bring us one of DC’s greatest villains.
On a side note, I’m hearing that DC/WB are hoping to have effectively two DC universes on the go, with plans to massively expand and develop Matt Reeves’ and Robert Pattinson’s The Batman universe and Pattinson’s younger Bruce Wayne could need trained… so it’s not impossible we’ll see Ra’s in that universe.
Thoughts? Would you like to see Sam Raimi bringing Ra’s Al Ghul back to the big screen? Yeah, of course you would…
Marc
Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….
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