Christopher Nolan Says That There Was No Such Thing as a "Reboot" Before His DARK KNIGHT Trilogy

It’s funny to think of how many superhero movies we have now, especially ones that are done on a big, grand scale, that once had films that were low-budget and not very well thought-out or received. Fans of the genre are lucky to live in a time where superhero stories are valued, and we are given these fascinating universes for the characters to play in.

I hadn’t given much thought before to when that turnover happened, paving the way from mediocre movies to ones that smash the box office and get the biggest names in Hollywood involved, but director Christopher Nolan is ready to set the record straight.

Back in the 80s and 90s, we got the Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher Batman movies that were cartoony and wild. They were a lot of fun for their time, and did attract some big names and good performances, but they weren’t cinematic dramas for just any film fan to enjoy. That came in 2005 when Nolan took on the Batman lore and went all the way back to the origin story in Batman Begins. Because this was the first time a character was reclaimed to tell their exact story in a new way, Nolan explained in an old interview with Film Comment:

“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 previously explained in an interview with Verbicide how his Batman was different from Burton’s, and even from the one in the comics, saying:

“If you look at what Tim Burton did, it’s specifically about a world that was created that Batman fits into. 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.

“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.”

It certainly was different, and I think it opened doors to what these types of films could be in the future.