Why Christopher Nolan Immediately Shot Down Sequel Ideas When Shooting ‘Batman Begins’

The first Batman film Christopher Nolan did kicked off his highly successful Dark Knight trilogy. But when he was in the midst of doing Batman Begins, he kept sequel talks at a minimum.

Christopher Nolan stopped himself from thinking about sequels while filming ‘Batman Begins’

Part of the reason why Nolan wanted to tackle a Batman film was to explore the character’s origin story. Richard Donner’s Superman served as huge inspiration for Nolan’s Batman Begins. The filmmaker was motivated by the fact that Batman never experienced his cinematic origin film the way Superman did.

“I can remember the trailers for it, I can remember about Superman the movie, all of that. And it was very clear to me that however brilliant — and it was very brilliant —Tim Burton’s take on Batman was in 1989, and it was obviously a worldwide smash, it wasn’t that sort of origin story, it wasn’t that real-world kind of epic movie,” Nolan once told The Hollywood Reporter.

He went on to emulate Superman’s idea by setting an extraordinary character in a hyper-realistic setting. It was a tone he’d maintain for the entire trilogy. However, Nolan didn’t even know if he’d make a trilogy.

“I only had a deal to do the one film. When I first spoke about the project with [screenwriter] David Goyer, I think we said, ‘I guess if it was successful. …’ At the time, everybody thought in terms of trilogies, which I guess they probably don’t anymore because they split the third film into two,” Nolan said.

Nolan confided that he did briefly wonder about potential sequels while filming Batman Begins. But he made sure those talks and thoughts didn’t last long.

“Privately, ourselves, we started to put together a vague idea of where a second and third film were going, and then I immediately shot them down. I was like, ‘You know what? You’ve got to put everything into the one movie and just try and make a great movie because you may not get this chance again,’” he said.

Christopher Nolan once shared the Joker card at the end of ‘Batman Begins’ wasn’t supposed to set up a sequel

Some might have believed that the end of Batman Begins telegraphed Nolan always intended to make a sequel. As the film was quickly approaching its closing credits, Christian Bale’s Batman is handed a Joker playing card. It’s a clear symbol of Batman’s arch-nemesis, who the character would end up battling in The Dark Knight.

But according to Nolan, the quick homage wasn’t meant to tease a sequel at all.

“It wasn’t really about setting up a sequel. I wanted [the audience] to leave the theater with their minds just spinning,” Nolan said in a separate interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “Batman has arrived. That was always the snap of the ending. It wasn’t really until months after the film came out that I said, ‘OK, now I want to know who the Joker is.’?”

Why Christopher Nolan was initially unwilling to do a ‘Batman Begins’ sequel

Although Batman Begins wasn’t nearly as financially successful as The Dark Knight, it was heavily praised by critics. The movie also had strong DVD sales, which further emboldened Warner Bros. to develop a sequel. But Begins being as liked as it was actually made Nolan even more reluctant to pen a sequel.

“Yeah. well you know, it’s daunting, the idea of taking on a sequel. I saw it, I came to see it as an interesting challenge, but at first I was a little bit unwilling to roll the device again, if you like. Because Batman Begins had been well received,” Nolan once told Collider. “There’s really no point in doing the sequel unless you can try and do something that you’ll be more interested in or that you hope the audience will be more interested in.”

Nolan knew he couldn’t tackle the freshness and originality of a Batman origin story again. The director went a different route that, given the film’s success, paid off immensely.

“So what we chose to do is to tell a very immediate, very linear story, but based on a slight genre shift, going a little more into the crime story, a little more into the kind of epic city stories of films like Michael Mann’s Heat, things like that, which I think achieve great scale, even though they’re confined within one city,” he said.