Batman! Did you hear about the bat-news? If Christopher Nolan were to make a fourth film, Christian Bale would reprise his role as Batman. If Nolan ever said to himself, 'You know what, I've got another story to tell,' it would be something, according to Bale. I would be in if he told that story with me.
There are many fans of the franchise. Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises were the three films that made the most money at the box office. The Dark Knight was thought to have been robbed of a Best Picture Oscar nomination due to the fact that the Motion Picture Academy expanded the number of Best Picture nominees.
Two questions arise from Bale's admission. What kind of Batman movie would Christopher Nolan make? Audiences would be interested in the direction the Batman franchise has taken in the last 10 years. This version of the Dark Knight should rise again.
Where can the filmmakers take the material from the trilogy in a fourth film? If a new film was announced in the next few months, it would take at least two and a half years for it to be seen. Four years passed between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. The release of Nolan's Batman movies might have been delayed because he made other films during that time. Even if he hadn't, making blockbusters on this scale is time- consuming, and Nolan's Dark Knight movies were epic undertakings.
Nolan is currently in postproduction on his next directorial effort, which features a huge all-star cast, as the man who invented the atomic bomb, and no other directorial projects are currently listed on the internet. The fourth Dark Knight film was going to be written by Nolan and his brother, Jonathan, and was going to be released in the fall of 2023. The last one was 13 years ago. What do you do with the story after 13 years?
At the end of The Dark Knight Rises, where were we? The League of Shadows, who occupied it for months, cut it off from the outside world, wrecked it, and almost blew it up. Batman flew the bomb away from the city, exploded it over the ocean at the very last second, and took an Italian holiday with Selina Kyle, because he didn't die instantly. Bruce Wayne let the world assume that Alfred was dead when he farewelled him as Bruce Wayne.
Was he still alive or dead? The evidence shows that there was no time to fly the nuke out over the water and extricate himself from the blast zone. He is seen inside the craft piloting it seconds before the bomb goes off, but it is a tight medium shot without any context. Nolan is playing with time here, so the shot of Batman and the shot of the nuke don't actually happen in a linear fashion.
It wouldn't be out of character for Nolan to arrange some events other than chronologically, as he does in almost all of his films. Bruce Wayne is alive and well and it is not just a fantasy of Alfred's, one he has already confessed to having. According to Bale, Bruce and Selina are alive and well, but he concedes that the question remains open for interpretation.
It doesn't matter The condition of a character at the end of a film doesn't affect their appearance in future episodes, just ask the makers of James Bond after No Time to Die and Skyfall. Characters are resurrected all the time in franchise movies. The actor's age is not a factor. If a new Dark Knight film starts production in the next few years, Bale would be 50. Robert Downey Jr. was in his 50's when he played Tony Stark.
Batman has a history of being different ages in different stories. The Dark Knight Returns was so influential that the character was 55 years old. Michael Keaton, who played Batman in the Tim Burton films, will be back as the character next year, and he is 70 years old. One example of how multiverse stories allow multiple versions of one character across different timelines is how a new Dark Knight movie could be released in the same schedule as the new Batman movie.
Where does that leave the other major actors? Bruce had a falling out with Alfred in The Dark Knight Rises, so should Michael retire, as he has denied, it won't be an issue. Gary Oldman played Commissioner Gordon in Batman Begins and Cilian Murphy played the Scarecrow in The Dark Knight Rises.
At the end of The Dark Knight Rises, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's name is revealed as "Robin", and it's possible that he'll return to the role. The movie ends with him quitting the police department and going to the Batcave as if he's going to inherit Batman or another DC character. The movie never happened due to a number of reasons, including the fact that Warner Brothers pivoted to DCEU movies so soon after Nolan stepped away, but featuring his character in a fourth film would be an obvious start.
The Clown Prince in The Dark Knight won an Oscar, but it's unlikely that he'll return in a fourth movie. A new actor in the role would be doomed from the beginning, coming up short in comparison to the point of distraction, because of the legend of the performance of Ledger. Fans would be unlikely to approve of a new version of the character, with the exception of Phoenix, who won an Oscar for playing the character in the movie.
The idea of pitting Phoenix's older Joker against Bale's Batman makes sense since the actor is 47 years old. The final scene from The Batman seems to suggest that there will be a sequel to The Batman, even though the film's director says it isn't the plan for now. It is likely that a fourth Dark Knight film will need to pivot to a different villain.
What would it do next? In the mid 2020s, who would Batman face? When it comes to the plights affecting America, comic book movies have had a hard time escaping from the 70s. Street crime used to be a big problem, along with urban decay and the Mob, but we are struggling with a lot of different problems today.
At the end of the Batman movie, fanatical white dudes threaten a public gathering. urban decay, street crime, and organized crime are the major threats to Gotham's well-being, as opposed to, say, the skyrocketing rents and gentrification that have threatened real 21st century.
The idea of the Riddler radicalizing his followers on social media is very contemporary, but why not organize the entire movie around it? That question is a rhetorical one. The Batman brand has fallen behind the MCU over the last decade at the domestic and global box office, so Warner Bros. is unlikely to use more overt politics.
In both The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan tried to address contemporary issues, such as Batman's extra-legal use of torture and domestic wiretapping, as well as the plot of The Dark Knight Rises. Nolan blames rich people for the decline of society because they are ignorant. A stuffed shirt condescendingly says, "There's no money here to steal" when Bane crashes the stock exchange.
Nolan is so ambitious in his stories that the social criticism is not given much attention. There is a possibility that both films could be better off as six- or 10-hour seasons of TV. The buckets of money spent on these movies is part of why they are so great. The cinematography in The Dark Knight Rises is some of the best you will see. That is not on the budget of Obi-Wan.
Between The Batman, the DCEU, and even the Lego Batman movies, Batman has given a lot of material just in the decade since Nolan's movies ended. Fans of Nolan's films would embrace a fourth entry even if it was released during the Reeves series.
Is it special in this environment. Could it find the right story, the right cast, the right villain, the right raison d'tre, and would Warner's fund it as it did its predecessors, to give it epic scope on the big screen? Batman is better off continuing in a new direction if he wants to stay relevant.
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