Those holding out hope for maddeningly noncommittal comments from Christopher Nolan regarding another Batman movie—with an extra dash of incredibly vague musings on his possible involvement with a new take on Superman—need look no further than his recent interview with Empire, in which the director talks at length about both projects without really saying much of anything. What he does reveal:
- He still hasn’t officially signed on for another Batman. (“The God's honest truth is I work on one movie at a time. I'm only capable of doing that, so my head will continue to be firmly in [Inception] for another few months.")
- His brother is nevertheless working on a screenplay, about which Nolan will only say that it is “the finishing of a story rather than infinitely blowing up the balloon and expanding the story.”
- There will be no return of the Joker under his watch, as he doesn’t “feel comfortable” recasting the role.
- As for his supposed “godfather”-like involvement in overseeing a new Superman project, he says only that he and David Goyer hashed out “a way to address Superman in a modern context” years ago during a Dark Knight lull, but he won’t say what it entails beyond it being “very exciting.”
- He’s not down with a Batman/Superman crossover: “They’re two very different characters, but there's an elemental feeling of power in the iconography of those characters. To me that's originally because they stood alone. I need to hang on to that in my imagining of them."
There you have it, sort of.