The Future of Batman

And I was just praising Warner Brothers in my previous post. Though it's unlikely to happen, Warner's CEO Jeff Bewkes announced the studio's desire for several Batman sequels:

“We look at Harry Potter. It’s fantastic to have franchises that last that long. We want to do that with Batman and Superman and perhaps Sherlock Holmes. The sequels are as good, with new characters added, as were the originals. That wasn’t the case in the years ago. Warners has more tentpoles as an on-going strategy that very much lifts its distribution and performance. We think that’s going to hold up our slate in the 2009 - 2010 period. We’ve got four more big tentpoles coming this year.”

Well if Bewkes is right about anything, this is not the case years ago. Does anyone remember "Batman and Robin?" I will say that the quality of the Harry Potter films have, more or less, been pretty good. I thought the fourth film was a bit of a slip up, but the fifth movie recovered the series quite well. If Batman were able to maintain that it'd be great... but can it?

Christian Bale and Micheal Cane are two actors that are "musts" for the franchise now. And frankly I don't want this Batman universe to continue without director Christopher Nolan. Maintaining the quality without him would be difficult. Have Warner Brothers come up with a plan to keep him on board? They're already having a hard enough time pulling him in for a third movie... Or are they?

Recent rumors have surfaced that the script for the third movie is currently seeing progress. IESB announced that Johnathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan and David Goyer were working on a script. Producer Chuck Roven replied to IESB with the following information:

The creative driver of the project at this point is Chris. There’s really nothing more for me to say about that. When he feels that he’s got something to talk about, then we’ll be able to talk about it.

But when asked who the villains might be, Roven responded:

[Big smile and a laugh] I really don’t want to talk about that project right now.

So what does it mean? My guess is the information on the third film being worked on right now is slightly exaggerated. If anything, Johnathan, Chris and David are probably just jotting notes and exchanging sparse phone calls now and then.

Judging from Roven, it doesn't sound like the third Batman film is very far in pre-production. Any other "reports" that come in can be labeled exaggerated or false until Warner Brothers and/or Christopher Nolan says something up front.

As for the rest of the franchise... Lets see if the third movie gets off the ground first.