Christopher Nolan's epic Batman series ended on a somewhat confusing note.
Batman was essentially dead, Bruce Wayne retired in Italy, and all the villains met a slow,
dramatic end.
But every resolution seemed to bring yet another cliffhanger.
So what exactly happened with the finale of The Dark Knight Rises?
Here's an explanation of what really went down in the ending of Nolan's Batman series,
and what it meant — and still could mean — for the future.
Blast survivor
During the climax of the movie, Batman scoops up the bomb threatening Gotham with his Batpod
and shoots off toward the ocean as fast as he can, where it eventually explodes at a
safe distance from the city.
The now-dead Batman is finally hailed as the hometown hero he was all along, and Alfred
heads to Florence, likely holding onto a sliver of hope that he'll find Bruce Wayne living
a new life as a quiet family man — just as he'd described at the beginning of the
film:
"I had this fantasy.
That I'd look across the tables, and I'd see you there.
With a wife."
Of course, Alfred does spot Bruce lunching with Selina Kyle in a pitch-perfect resolution
that, well, seems almost too good to be true.
And for many viewers, it was.
Some fans interpreted this as another instance of Christopher Nolan spinning top-style trickery.
They saw the scene of Wayne's perfect retirement as a part of Alfred's imagination.
But Christian Bale says what we saw was what we got.
"My personal opinion is no, it was not a dream, that that was for real."
The fact that Lucius Fox later discovers that the autopilot function on the Bat had been
restored by Bruce himself certainly lent some credence to Alfred's vision, too.
The light knight rises
If Batman was the Dark Knight, then Officer John Blake as the franchise's Robin is certainly
a lighter shade of justice.
"You should use your full name.
I like that name.
Robin."
"Thanks."
The orphan boy-turned-honest cop was a champion of kids in need, and helped reconnect Wayne
Enterprises with the orphanage he'd grown up in.
He's also the perfect person to take over and become the city's newest masked hero in
Batman's stead, a future that was heavily hinted at when he found the Batcave at the
end of the film.
We don't get to see what his crime-fighting style might be like, but based on his do-gooder
attitude throughout the collapse of the city, Blake could be an optimistic successor to
Wayne's tenure as Gotham's resident hero.
So the movie's closing moments, where Blake gets the keys to the cave asks the obvious
question…
Room for a sequel?
It's been several years since The Dark Knight Rises closed out Nolan's Batman trilogy.
But the ending to the film definitely left the door open to more exploration of his grim
vision of Gotham City.
With Blake taking over the Batcave and plenty of villains from the comics waiting for their
turn on-screen, there's a ton of material to make this film series a quadrilogy or even
larger.
Unfortunately, the would-be star of such a sequel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, has cast doubt
on the idea of Nolan's series ever getting a fourth installment.
He told Cinema Blend:
"I think Nolan very much thought of that movie as a conclusion, and there's a theme that
runs through all three of those movies that begins in the first movie, runs through the
second movie and it concludes in that moment where he says that Batman is more than a man,
Batman is a symbol.
And so to have another man other than Bruce Wayne kind of becoming Batman at the end of
that trilogy, I think that's the perfect ending to that story."
But still!
Even if Nolan and Gordon-Levitt aren't interested in returning to the material, another filmmaker
could, in theory, pick up where Nolan's series left off somewhere down the line.
After all, Bryan Singer's Superman Returns was a sequel to Superman II...26 years later
— and Singer just straight up ignored Superman III and IV.
So never say never.
Setting a tone
Before the Dark Knight, the Campiness of 1997's Batman and Robin derailed the Caped Crusader's
movie bankability.
"Hi Freeze.
I'm Batman."
But the end of Nolan's series signified a major tonal shift, giving us a much more serious
and dramatic style than the previous set of Batman films.
"I'm Batman."
That new, more grounded view of DC's comic book characters would become something of
an inadvertent standard for the DC Expanded Universe films to follow.
Just look at Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice's grim, gritty vision of Batman.
The same dark tone colored the palettes of Henry Cavill's Superman, and Justice League
looks like it's heading in the same direction.
And that's not the only precedent Nolan's films set for the Batworld, either.
The standalone series
Everyone knows that shared comic movie universes are all the rage right now.
After all, there's a lot of money to be made by dangling one piece of the shared universe
as a must-see for the eventual superhero smash film that's coming soon from each studio.
Even Harry Potter has gotten in on the sequel-prequel spinoff game.
But The Dark Knight films proved that an endless extension of a beloved property isn't always
necessary to rake in the big bucks and earn respect at the same time.
While sequel hopes might always loom over Nolan's trilogy, it currently stands alone
as its own three-part series that earned a lot of respect from critics and had audiences
forking over their cash at the same time.
It's hard to imagine what might've become of the series if Nolan had allowed Warner
Bros. to spin the franchise out into a shared universe of its own.
But the fact is that he didn't, and his movies still accomplished everything they meant to.
Hopefully future filmmakers will look back his trilogy — and its standalone ending
— as the perfect way to handle high profile properties for the next generation...
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