I think The Dark Knight Returns would make an excellent animated movie...and I do dig the Daniel Day Lewis suggestion for Bruce Wayne/Batman for a live action movie. Would Lewis consider the part though if he was offered?
Apparently he turned down the role that Liam Neeson played in Begins. It was next offered to Viggo Mortensen (ironically, DDL was Peter Jackson's first choice to play Aragorn in LOTR) before being offered to Day-Lewis' Gangs of New York co-star, Liam Neeson. Obviously Nolan and Goyer wanted to cast someone associated with Mentor Roles, so as to play against type when The Twist was revealed.
I'd be surprised if Dan The Method Man did a superhero movie, though I'd love to see him as Doctor Strange. I could also see him as an older Bruce Wayne. Some years ago, Richard Donner was rumoured to be interested in a Superman v Batman movie (this was some years before the Wolfgang Peterson project) and his casting choice would have been DDL for Supes and Mel Gibson for Bats. But as Day-Lewis has declined roles such as The Saint and James Bond, its unlikely that he'd do something like this unless the right director was to do it.
Having said that, he mentioned how he was moved to tears by the death of Heath Ledger, so perhaps if he saw how good the latter was in TDK, he might be interested in starring in a similar movie himself. The best hope I have is that he has two young sons who must be hitting their teens soon. I'm hoping that they become big comic fans and persuade their un-prolific dad to do a superhero movie. After all, if Ed Norton, Robert Downey Jr and Christian Bale can do them, why can't he?
As to the main topic, while I don't think that time has been overly kind to DKR, I wouldn't mind seeing a live-action adaptation of it at some stage. Snyder would be well suited to it, but I like the suggestion of a HBO version. It would need to be updated - eg, getting rid of the references to Reagan etc, unless he was to do it in the style of the Watchmen movie, which I understand is still set in the 1980s and still includes Nixon and other characters from history.
I think it would be important to leave some time between it and the Nolan/ Bale movies, though. The general public would assume that it must be a sequel to TDK (fair enough assumption, really) and apart from anything else, there is plenty of scope left in the universe established by Nolan and co. Wait until it has concluded before doing this. But following the realist take on Batman (once it's come to its natural end) with a fantastic, science-fiction version makes some sense, yeah.
