Rebooting Batman

A number of interesting news bites have come out of a recent interview with Jeff Robinov, president of the Warner Bros. motion picture group, including word of a planned "Justice League" movie in 2013. Possibly paving the way for that DC superhero team-up is another off-hand comment in the same interview — one that could indicate plans to reboot the entire Batman movie franchise after Christopher Nolan's third and final film, "The Dark Knight Rises."

"We have the third Batman, but then we’ll have to reinvent Batman," Robinov told the L.A. Times. "Chris Nolan and [producing partner and wife] Emma Thomas will be producing it, so it will be a conversation with them about what the next phase is."

Could Batman be headed for yet another reboot? It certainly seems that way. (Splash Page)

This isn't surprising news, but it's still disappointing. It used to be that rebooting was the nuclear option of movie and TV franchises. An admission that things had gotten so dire, either because the story needed to be refreshed or that the series was no longer profitable, that that there was no other way to salvage it. Now it's just routine. Battlestar Galactica. James Bond. Star Trek. Spider-Man. Superman. Friday the 13th. A Nightmare on Elm Street. V. A few of these may have required reboots, but most didn't. Neither does Batman.

If movie trilogy history is a reliable indicator, The Dark Knight Rises is probably going to be bad. Maybe just lackluster bad, like The Godfather Part III, Return of the Jedi or Back to the Future Part III. Maybe epically bad, like Scream 3, Spider-Man 3, or Jurassic Park III. And even if it somehow defies the odds and ends up being good, the franchise is still faced with losing Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale, on top of no longer having Heath Ledger. So on one hand, I can see why WB might want to start from scratch.

But on the other hand, it seems like it's mainly being done for two awful reasons: First, as an ego stroke to Nolan, and second, so they can put Batman into a Justice League movie.

Batman comics have been coming out on a more or less monthly basis for decades. Have all of them been good? No. But every month, with each issue, their writers and artists take what other writers and artists have done before them--the good stuff, the bad stuff, and the really ugly stuff--and build on it. They don't have the luxury of just ignoring everything and starting over, and they certainly don't get to declare that their Batman story is the end of the franchise.

So I sort of have a problem with what Nolan and WB are apparently doing. Batman doesn't need to be "reinvented" after The Dark Knight Rises. Just continued. Nolan's films are great. But they're not so great that they need to be concluded when Nolan and Bale depart. There are other writers and directors who can build on the foundations of what he, Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer have constructed. There are other actors who can play Batman. (Some can probably even do a halfway decent Batman voice, as opposed to Bale's violent rasping.) Are we going to get a new Batman trilogy every decade, each one retelling his origin, fighting the Joker, banging Catwoman, etc. over and over? That kind of seems like the road WB is going down.

There's also the implication that Nolan's version of Batman is somehow incompatible with a Justice League film. I get that he and Bale want nothing to do with it--if I were them, I wouldn't either--but since they're leaving anyway, that shouldn't be an issue. Batman's perfectly capable of patrolling Gotham in a Dark Knight Rises sequel and helping Superman and Wonder Woman fight Amazo or Starro the Conqueror or whoever in Justice League. He does it every month in the comics, and no one's head explodes.

Finally, how the hell is a Justice League film going to come out in 2013? They're not going to have time to relaunch Batman before then, and it's going to be difficult to tie the new Green Lantern and Superman franchises into it. If it's going to be totally separate from the existing franchises, doesn't that totally defeat the purpose of even doing a Justice League film?

Whatever. All this makes my head hurts. Just bring back Super Friends.