Before Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder made Batman all gritty and humourless, Batman was actually fun.
Joel Schumacher's penchant for picking wacky soundtracks and attaching nipples to rubber suits might not have been to everyone's taste, but there's no denying that Batman Forever and the sequel, Batman & Robin, were fun. Terrible, but fun.
A sequel was planned in the early stage of production for Batman & Robin that was - mercifully - scrapped as the terrible reviews and diminished box-office came in for Batman & Robin. Schumacher's third Batman film would have been known as Batman Triumphant and would have seen a well-known musician from the late '90s playing Dr. Jonathan Crane, better known as The Scarecrow.
That musician? Coolio. Yes, really.
As Coolio tells it, he took on a small role in Batman & Robin with the proviso that he'd have a much larger role in the next film. According to a recent interview with the singer, "they promised me the villain part in the following Batman, which they didn't do because Joel Schumacher — they fired him. Me and him didn't get along that great anyway... The next Batman the villain was supposed to be the Scarecrow."
However, in an interview with THR back in 2015, Joel Schumacher said that it wasn't Coolio, but Nicolas Cage who was supposed to play Scarecrow. "After Forever's success, I wanted to do The Dark Knight. It was going to be very dark. I remember going to the set of Face/Off and asking Nic Cage to play the Scarecrow."
Of course, all this is moot as our own Cillian Murphy played the definitive on-screen version of Scarecrow in Batman Begins. Still, it just goes to show just how weird Batman was at one point.
Via THR