Will Christopher Nolan Make a Third Batman Film?

By Andy Hunsaker, Fancast Movies

The Dark Knight may soon be the second highest grossing film of all time, and if Heath Ledger hadn’t died, chances are a third film with more Joker hijinks would have been a foregone conclusion. Without him, though, there can be no more Joker in Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City. Which leaves the burning question of “where to go from here?”

Nerds on the internet are already hotly debating this topic, including a cool thread at the Something Awful forums about photoshopping their casting choices into interesting versions of Batman villains - currently in the lead are Crispin Glover or Michael C. Hall as the RIddler, although there’s a contingent who thinks it would be brilliant to bring Jim Carrey back on to do a radically different and darker take on the same character he played in Joel Schumacher’s unpleasant Batman Forever. There are also those who don’t believe Aaron Eckhart’s Two-Face is completely out of the picture, either.

Then, of course, there’s the rumor that ex-Catwoman Julie Newmar started about the notion that Angelina Jolie has actually inquired about playing Selina Kyle in a third installment of this current Batman series. This would easily be a wet dream for Warner Bros. if they could swing it (as well as for at least half the audience). The path is clear now for a female-driven Batman film, and Catwoman and, say, Poison Ivy as an environmental terrorist and serial killer with an agenda, could make for a completely different tone, which will be necessary to do in a third film, as there’s no way to out-dark The Dark Knight.

All spitballing and rumination aside, though, the central question has yet to be answered - will Nolan even return for a third Batman film?

The tendency is to think ‘of course he will, that kind of success is impossible to ignore.’ Nolan has said, though, that he only does one film at a time, without much thought to sequels, and that he tries to make each film as good as it can be on its own. He’s certainly done that with The Dark Knight. It’s entirely possible, maybe even likely, that Nolan will step away from the franchise, knowing that he can’t top the magic mix of elements, both in reality and on the screen, that made this film the staggering achievement it’s become. He has nothing left to prove.

Then again, he could take the Zack Snyder approach. Snyder, who is currently shouldering the monumental responsibility to attempt to make a movie based on the revered graphic novel Watchmen, has said he took on the film after initially hesitating because the fear of seeing a horrible adaptation of Watchmen outweighed his own worry about whether or not he was capable of making a good one. If he turned down his chance to make it good, he’d feel responsible for how bad the final product would be, even though he had nothing to do with making it. Since we’ve all seen how awful Batman films can be when the franchise switches visions in mid-stream (trading Tim Burton for Joel Schumacher), there’s a definite worry that whenever Batman 3 comes around, it might be a trainwreck in, say, Brett Ratner’s hands.

Although there’s been no indication that Burton feels responsible for what Schumacher did - or that Bryan Singer feels responsible for what Ratner did to the X-Men, for that matter, maybe Nolan will feel responsible if someone else does the third movie and completely ruins what he’s established with the first two. There have been some very loose discussions between Nolan and screenwriter David Goyer about where a third film might go, and ideas are apparently there. Goyer and co-screenwriter John Nolan, the director’s brother, have also indicated that there’s no mandate to bring in an established villain, either.

“We’re not gonna tell you… other than to say that Batman has been published for 70 years. In the first movie we use Ra’s Al Ghul and The Scarecrow, who had not been in the movies before, and had not been in the sixties TV show before. And there are dozens if not hundreds of other characters that fit that bill. Everyone says its gotta be The Penguin or Catwoman… well I completely disagree.”

So perhaps they’ll go with Hush, a recent addition to the Batman mythos. Perhaps they will go in the direction of Gotham Central and make it more of police procedural dealing with the aftermath of Batman’s operations. Perhaps they’ll choose Dr. Death, Batman’s first ever supervillain in 1939, or Hugo Strange - a psychologist who becomes obsessed with being Batman himself (and a true stroke of genius would be to cast Michael Keaton in that particular role). There are many options beyond the ones that nerds are talking about.

My personal inclination is to think that he won’t come back. Even though there’s much more potential to mine from what’s been established so far, the two movies stand on their own, and the notion of trying to outdo themselves in the wake of what The Dark Knight has achieved will feel like an impossibility. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but “third movie syndrome” is another daunting fear. Nolan has already made his Empire Strikes Back. There is not necessarily a need for this particular Jedi to return.