With the Joss Whedon-directed “The Avengers” setting up for Friday’s high-profile rollout in U.S. theaters, the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” creator is getting a chance to spin his yarns from years in the business. During an interview with GQ, he revealed a good one about his swing at the “Batman” movie franchise, which eventually went instead to director Christopher Nolan.

Cinema Blend reports on the piece, saying: “Before Christopher Nolan completely transformed The Dark Knight’s role in popular culture, Whedon had a meeting with Warner Bros. for his own take on the character — and … it wasn’t just different from Nolan’s story, but inherently Whedon-esque in the way it handled the character’s motivation. In short, it made billionaire Bruce Wayne something of an outcast.”

According to the GQ piece: “There was a lot more, in Whedon’s take, about the orphaned Bruce Wayne as a morbid, death-obsessed kid. There was a scene — Whedon used to well up, just thinking about it — where young Bruce tries to protect this girl from being bullied in an alley, an alley like the one his parents were murdered in.”

Says Whedon, in GQ: "And he’s like this tiny 12-year-old who’s about to get the shit kicked out of him. And then it cuts to Wayne Manor, and Alfred is running like something terrible has happened, and he finds Bruce, and he’s back from the fight, and he’s completely fine. And Bruce is like, ‘I stopped them. I can stop them.’ That was the moment for me. When he goes ‘Oh, wait a minute; I can actually do something about this.’ The moment he gets that purpose, instead of just sort of being overwhelmed by the grief of his parents’ death."

Warner Bros. rejected Whedon’s version of the story, going instead with Nolan’s vision for Batman.

Cinema Blend reports: “Whedon was so invested in it that he was devastated — and that was even before he got the call, the same day, telling him that ‘Firefly’ was canceled. One of the many reasons Whedon has developed such a devoted fanbase is because of his successes combined with his failures — the notion that he was out there struggling just like we were, and even being a brilliant writer and the creator of something as successful as ‘Buffy’ didn’t guarantee anything.”