Darkwing: First Darkness is an unmade in-universe live-action film from the 2017 Continuum.
Description[]
This gritty reboot of the Darkwing Duck franchise was proposed by psychologically-minded British director Alistair Boorswan to Scrooge McDuck's movie studios, McDuck Pictures, which, so far, had only produced office safety videos. The movie would have starred Drake Mallard (president of the DW fanclub and future real-life Darkwing) as the titular superhero, fighting a surprisingly muscular take on Megavolt. First Darkness was, as its name implied, extremely dark, featuring a Darkwing Duck unafraid to hurt civilians and damage the city in his attempts to take down evil both without and within.
This ostentatious grittiness was not to the taste of Scrooge's grandnephew Dewey Duck, and, since Scrooge intended to market the film as a fun action flick, he considered that Dewey was a good enough example of the target audience to be handed the reins of the production. Dewey's over-the-top approach to filmmaking (which included buzzsaw jugglers and Darkwing Dancers) combined with disgruntled former Darkwing Jim Starling's attempts to sabotage the production ended up sinking the film, which was never completed.
Behind the scenes[]
A parody of Christopher Nolan's gritty reboot of the Batman story, Darkwing: First Darkness is central to the story of the 2019 DuckTales 2017 episode The Duck Knight Returns.