Several of the retrospectives we have done this month have been about Disney properties. DC has a landmark of its own to celebrate in the year of 2022. It's time to talk about Batman.
The Dark Knight Rises was released in New York in July of 2012 and followed by a wider release in July of the following year. A decade after the end of The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne (a returning Christian Bale) has retired from being Batman and lived in his mansion as a recluse, with the crime rate going down after Harvey Dent died. Bruce gets pulled back into the lifestyle he has spent the last eight years avoiding when Anne Hathaway plays Selina Kyle in the movie. Just as Batman is getting back into the swing of things, so is the character of Bane. If Bruce is going to have a chance of saving the League of Shadows from the clutches of the masked mercenary, he needs to get his rhythm back and repair his back.
When all was said and done, Rises became Nolan's highest-grossing movie of all time, with a worldwide gross of over one billion dollars. It is the second Batman film to do so. The film is considered one of the best superhero films of all time, as well as being one of the best films of the 2010s. Rises has a legacy of its own, even if it doesn't have the cultural staying power that Knight did, thanks in part to the lateHeath Ledger's Joker.
The Dark Knight Rises is the last big budget superhero film to go out on its own, and the end of the superhero movie genre's relationship with self-contained stories. There have been multiple imitators in the wake of The Avenger and the MCU. Hollywood got hit with a case of the Cinematic Universe when it came to Power Rangers and other comic books. Nolan did not pretend that such a thing was on their minds. Nolan has been away from the superhero genre since 2012 when he conceived the story of Man of Steel with David Goyer, and also served as executive producer.
The isolated spirit of Nolan's trilogy is still alive even in the age of forward momentum. The Batman from earlier this year is about the same as Nolan's films. There are two TV spinoffs in the works, but they are focused on elements of the Bat-mythos and come across as natural extensions of the film. Everyone tried their hand at self-containment with the help of Moon Knight. Oscar Isaac's supernatural thriller doesn't feel like it needs to remind you that it's in the same world as the Avenger or Daredevil.
There is something commendable about how Nolan only focused on himself until the very end of his trilogy. The films popularized a number of trends in modern blockbuster cinema, from the modern concept of a "grounded,gritty reboot" to superhero films trying to gesture towards big political or socio-economic concepts. In this age of everything being connected and consuming media is starting to feel more and more like homework, the outliers who decided not to jump on the bandwagon are all the stronger for it. It doesn't seem like anyone at WB is interested in seeing what Nolan's world is like with Joseph Gordon-Levitt taking over as Batman's protectors It isn't like we're short on stories about Batman or his followers.
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