“The audience doesn’t give you any choice”: Christopher Nolan’s Gut Told Him Not to Make The Dark Knight Rises for a Simple Reason That is Historically Accurate

Despite a historically accurate reading of Hollywood’s storied past, great directors and filmmakers make it their business to break and set records with their career’s work. Christopher Nolan is invariably one such director who continues to defy the laws of physics in his films just as he manipulates the laws of human psychology when it comes to breaking box office records.

However, it is rare to find a combination of good filmmakers with complete artistic and creative taste who don’t eventually fall prey to the studio system. Return on investments and profit guides the business models of modern-day Hollywood and to keep making films, it becomes imperative that directors, creatives, and actors all fall in line with the company policy.

As such, the audience of the 21st century’s cinematic era is blessed to have auteurs like Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve who possess a clear vision for their artistic medium of expression. Without them, cinema would fall to ruins, existing merely as a vestige of the past, and eroding quickly with the inevitable recession of directors like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, and Quentin Tarantino.

Christopher Nolan Tried to Escape One Hollywood Curse

It is not too far-fetched to believe that Christopher Nolan wanted to resort to another course of action while coming up with the ending of his Dark Knight trilogy. After all, even the best and most talented of people often become victims of superstitious beliefs and pray to the Powers-That-Be when one’s life’s work is on the line.

In hindsight, the DC trilogy never saw financial trouble and creatively didn’t struggle through its second or third act, but for Christopher Nolan, it was quite literally easier said than done. But to protect his only franchise that would potentially get the sequel/franchise treatment, Nolan turned to an alternative solution rather than the tried-and-tested studio recipe for a threequel’s success.

Surely it was valid to fear the curse of the sequels that befell almost all the great film franchises and haunted directors to the end of their days, often ruining careers and destroying audience expectations. After all, not every movie could turn out like The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and not succumb to the fate that drove The Godfather III into the recesses of time.

Christopher Nolan Invents a New Recipe For Dark Knight

A director of Christopher Nolan’s caliber would know better than to tempt his luck by spawning a sequel to the sequel of Batman Begins – a movie that was originally meant to be a one-off for DC and the director. Instead, Nolan stretched his directorial vision for Batman’s story by splitting up a singular arc into three parts. The Dark Knight trilogy became Batman’s life story viewed through the lens of a beginning, a middle, and an end – with each arc aiming higher than the last.

According to Christopher Nolan [via “The Nolan Variations” on X]:

There are no good third sequels, basically, Rocky III maybe. But they are very difficult. So my instinct was to change genres. The first one is an origin story. The second one is a crime drama very much like Heat, and the third one, we needed to blow up bigger, because you can’t scale down.

The audience doesn’t give you any choice, but nor can you go back and do what you did before. So you’ve got to shift genres. We went for the historical epic, the disaster film, The Towering Inferno meets Doctor Zhivago.

In the end, The Dark Knight Rises did blow up bigger than the rest by claiming the rare distinction of being one of the few trilogy doorstops that leaves the franchise in a better place for the audience without the added weight of a fourth story.

Despite the teaser left behind by Robin’s surprise reveal, the best that DC can do is leave that particular arc to the viewer’s imagination or direct a spin-off with a separate director and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the lead rather than bring back the Christopher Nolan-Christian Bale duo.

The Dark Knight trilogy is available for streaming on Max.