Christopher Nolan Once Shared How the Idea of ‘Reboots’ Didn’t Exist Before His ‘Batman Begins’
Christopher Nolan helped revamp the Batman mythology onscreen by delivering on his Dark Knight trilogy. But his success with The Dark Knight trilogy may have been the catalyst for the film reboots audiences see today.
Christopher Nolan once shared why his new Batman films had to look different from Tim Burton’s
2005 saw Nolan introducing the world to his vision of a live-action Batman after Tim Burton’s and Joel Schumacher’s films. One of the many things that interested Nolan about making his own Batman film was the aesthetic of his feature. Nolan noticed that Burton’s Batman movies had a Gothic, almost fantastical element to them that he wanted to avoid in his own films.
“If you look at what Tim Burton did, it’s specifically about a world that was created that Batman fits into,” Nolan once said in an interview with Verbicide. “It’s this great Gothic vision that’s very consistent, and consistent with the character of Batman. What I felt I hadn’t seen, especially in comics, was an ordinary world in which we could be living in Gotham.”
Nolan wanted to experiment with what a Batman would feel like in a reality that was very similar to ours.
“When a Gothamite sees Batman, he’s as extraordinary as he would be in our world. I wanted an extraordinary character in the background of an ordinary world. That isn’t what Tim did, so I thought it was a whole other direction to go in,” the filmmaker added.
Christopher Nolan once explained that the idea of reboots didn’t exist before his ‘Batman Begins’
Superhero films have been known to get the reboot treatment from Hollywood. Comic book icons like Spider-Man, X-Men, Superman, and so on have all had different versions of themselves onscreen over the years. But it’s not just limited to comic book movies, as even films outside the comic sub-genre have experienced similar makeovers.
Nolan once suggested that his Batman Begins may have been responsible for stimulating this newfound trend.
“It’s a sign of how quickly things change in the movie business, but there was no such thing conceptually as a ‘reboot.’ That idea didn’t exist when I came to look at Batman. That’s new terminology. Warner Bros. owned this wonderful character, and didn’t know what to do with it. It had sort of reached a dead end with its previous iteration,” Nolan once said in an interview with Film Comment.
Christopher Nolan knew his idea for ‘The Dark Knight’ trilogy would be controversial
Comic books, animated shows, and even some movies usually paint Batman’s mission to save Gotham city as ongoing and eternal. But in the beginning, Nolan wanted his Batman to have an end-goal in mind for his journey. A decision he stuck to even though he knew it might not go over well with fans.
“And we always presented it, and were consistent with it in the three films of mine, as a finite mission in his mind,” Nolan once told Forbes. “Which I know is a controversial aspect of the character, but it made the most sense to us to say he sees it as a lever for improving things in Gotham, for getting the good to take back their city from evil, and that at a point that mission will be finished.”
