It goes without saying that if you haven’t seen The Dark Knight Rises yet, there will be spoilers here because we’re going to discuss the ending of the film.
Yes, The Dark Knight Rises is about to come out on DVD and Blu-ray on December 4, and I’d definitely like to give it a second chance because as I wrote before on TG, I certainly had mixed feelings about it the first time around in the theater.
Before the movie came out, there were rumors that Batman died at the end, yet of course the ending was done in an ambiguous, open-ended way where you can look at it from multiple perpsective. On the eve of the film’s home video release, speculation has hit the ‘Net that Joseph Gordon Levitt will be the new Dark Knight in Justice League, but those rumors were shot down very quickly.
Whether Batman will continue again down the road or not, director Christopher Nolan recently spoke about Rises, and as Collider and Film Comment reports, Nolan has said, “The open-ended nature of the film is simply a very important thematic idea that we wanted to get into the movie, which is that Batman is a symbol. He can be anybody, and that was very important to us.”
Nolan has indeed been very clear that this is the end of his version of Batman, just like the surviving members of Zeppelin swear up and down they won’t reunite. The director added, “For me, The Dark Knight Rises is specifically and definitely the end of the Batman story as I wanted to tell it.”
As far as Batman being anybody, it can certainly leave the door open for more movies, and if there are indeed plans for more of the Dark Knight in the future, nobody’s telling. Nolan and Bale had to step in and save the Batman flicks from the horror of 1997’s Batman and Robin. Yet as Nolan told Film Comment, “There was no such thing conceptually as a ‘reboot,’” when he came aboard. “That’s new terminology.” (The first time I ever heard the term “reboot” in a cinematic context was in regards to Batman Begins back in 2005).
As Nolan further explained, Batman “sort of reached a dead end in its previous iteration. I got excited about the idea of filling in this interesting gap – no one had ever done the origin story of Batman.”
Nolan also surprisingly said he wanted to do Batman much like Richard Donner’s take on Superman, which is one of the best comic movies ever, but nowhere near as dark as Batman.
“To me what that represented was a firstly a detailed telling of the origin story,” Nolan concluded.
