Holy headlines, Batman! Have you heard the Bat-news? Christian Bale has said he would play Batman/Bruce Wayne once again for Christopher Nolan should the auteur behind the massively successful Dark Knight trilogy be interested in making a fourth film. Bale recently told Screen Rant: “In my mind, it would be something if Nolan ever said to himself, ‘You know what, I’ve got another story to tell.’ And if he wished to tell that story with me, I’d be in.”
This is big news for fans of the franchise, of which there are many. The three films — Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) — grossed almost $2.5 billion dollars at the global box officeand they were critically acclaimed as well. So many people believed that The Dark Knight was robbed of a Best Picture Oscar nomination that the Motion Picture Academy expanded the number of Best Picture nominees to prevent such omissions from occurring in the future – likely paving the way for the Best Picture nominations awarded to Black Panther and Joker.
Bale’s admission lends itself to two natural questions. What would a new Christopher Nolan Batman movie look like? And would audiences be interested after the directions the Batman franchise has gone in the last decade? Given the opportunity, should this version of the Dark Knight rise again?
What would a new Dark Knight film look like?
The first question in considering a fourth film is where could the filmmakers go from the material established in the trilogy? Even if a new film was announced in, say, the next few months, it would be at least two, and more likely three or four years, before anything hit the screen. Three years elapsed between Batman Begins and The Dark Knightand four years went by between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. Granted, Nolan made other films within that period (The Prestige and Inception), which perhaps delayed a more timely release of his Batman movies. But even if he hadn’t, making blockbusters on this scale is time-consuming, and Nolan’s Dark Knight movies were epic undertakings (he compared making The Dark Knight Rises to D.W. Griffith’s massive 1916 epic Intolerance, one of the most enormous productions ever mounted in terms of scale and scope).
Nolan is currently in postproduction on his next directorial effort, Oppenheimer (starring Cillian Murphy, alongside a huge all-star cast, as the man who invented the atomic bomb) and IMDB currently lists no other upcoming directorial projects for him. So let’s say that Nolan announced he was writing a fourth Dark Knight film in the fall of 2022 — presumably with his brother, Jonathan Nolan, who co-wrote the the last two films — and it was going in front of the cameras in the fall of 2023, to be released in summer 2025, probably the absolutely earliest it could happen. That would be 13 years since the last one. Where do you go with this story and these characters after 13 years?
Is Batman even alive in this universe?
Consider where we were at the conclusion of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. Batman had narrowly saved Gotham City from Bane (Tom Hardy), Talia al Ghul (Marion Cotillard), and The League of Shadows, who occupied it for months, cut it off from the outside world, wrecked much of its functioning infrastructure, and then almost blew it up with an atomic bomb. Batman flew the bomb away from the city, exploding it over the ocean at the very last second, whereupon he somehow did not perish instantaneously and took an Italian holiday with Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway). There, as Bruce Wayne, he said a final goodbye to his faithful butler, Alfred (Michael Caine), and let the world presume him dead.
But was he dead or not? The evidence on screen seems to point the former, as there was no time to fly the nuke out over the water and extricate himself from the blast radius, established earlier in the film as six miles. Seconds before the bomb went off, he is seen inside the craft piloting it, though, granted, it is a tight medium shot without any establishing context. Some have presumed that Nolan is playing with time here, that the shot of Batman and the shot of the nuke exploding seconds later don’t actually happen linearly.
Though this seems like a massive cheat given all that’s come before, it certainly wouldn’t be out of character for Nolan to arrange some events non-chronologicallyas he does in, well, almost all of his films. In that case, Bruce Wayne is alive and it’s not all just a fantasy of Alfred’s, one he has already confessed to having earlier in the film. For his part, Bale believes that Bruce and Selina are alive and well (presumably enjoying a Aperol Spritz in some Florentine piazza), but he concedes that the question remains open for interpretation.
Not that it matters. The condition of a character at the end of a film or even an entire franchise obviously makes no difference to that character’s appearance in future episodes (just ask the makers of James Bond after No Time to Die and, for that matter, Skyfall as they scour the earth for Daniel Craig’s replacement). Franchises resurrect characters all the time on the flimsiest of pretenses. Nor is the age of the character or the actor necessarily a consideration. Bale would only be 50 if a new Dark Knight film started shooting in the next few years. Robert Downey Jr. was in his early 50s when he played Tony Stark in the final two Avengers movies.
Anyway, Batman/Bruce Wayne has a history of being all different ages in various stories. In Frank Miller’s seminal graphic novel The Dark Knight Returnsso influential in ushering the dark, violent Batman ethos that predominates today, the character was 55. Michael Keaton, who played Batman in the Tim Burton films, will be back as the character in The Flash next year (assuming the film gets released, given the controversy surrounding its starEzra Miller), and he’s 70. Keaton’s return is also one more example of how “multiverse” storytelling allows multiple versions of one character across different timelines, allowing for a way that a new Dark Knight movie could exist in the same release schedule as the rebooted Robert Pattinson-starring Batman movies.