It’s still a little hard to swallow that Christopher Nolan is planning to end his Batman series with THE DARK KNIGHT RISES.

It hardly seems an epic enough journey for his take on the character since he ‘begun’ in 2005. Rumours were abound earlier this year that Warner Bros. would be totally rebooting the franchise when Nolan wraps on RISES, and that too felt like a huge mistake on their part. Mass audiences respond to Nolan’s take, not just die-hard genre fans like ourselves (hell, even my mother saw THE DARK KNIGHT due to peer pressure, and she doesn’t even like movies!). Personally, we’ve always maintained that Nolan should continue the story in a producer role (just as he’s acting as a Godfather of sorts to Zack Snyder’s MAN OF STEEL) and hand over the keys to his canon to an entrusted director. In the following snippet from Gary Oldman (Commissioner Gordon in Nolan’s universe) we pulled from a recent interview, he seems to hint that the latter might actually be more of a possibility…

Talking to CraveOnline, Oldman had this to say: “For us I think it’s the end. Whether they will make more, my guess is probably. So, there could be a ‘Batman 4’ and ‘5.’ It may be Chris overseeing it in a producorial position, but for us and for Chris I think that’s it. It’s a great way to go out though. It’s a great story. Epic, epic thing it is.”

We certainly hope this is the case and they stick with the current canon, even if Bale and Oldman won’t return I think we can cope with the suspension of disbelief that would be required. After all, we bought that Rachel Dawes went from looking like Katie Holmes in BATMAN BEGINS to Maggie Gyllenhall in THE DARK KNIGHT with minimum of fuss.

Time will tell what Warner Bros. decides to do with the Caped Crusader, but in the meantime we still have TDKR to look forward to. And although Oldman et al have had to stay schtum on the deets, the actor did reveal the following, previously unknown plot nugget to Moviefone…

“We find him (Gordon) – obviously I can’t give too much away because I’m sworn to secrecy – but when we meet him, things are calmer in Gotham. It’s reminiscent of the Gordon that we met in the first one. There’s a world-weariness to him, and even though things on the surface are now calmer, he’s cleaned up Gotham with the Harvey Dent Act, it’s seething underneath.” 

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES July 20th.

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