The Dark Knight Rises: 10 Directors Who Could Take Batman Next

You may not have heard, but next month’s The Dark Knight Rises is director Christopher Nolan’s final Batman film, and he wants everyone to know it. And while Sean Connery taught us never to say never, we here at ComicBook.com are reasonably willing to believe that the filmmaker has no particular intention of coming back in the foreseeable future.Still, Batman is a thriving property responsible for some of the highest-grossing films in the history of cinema. Assuming The Dark Knight Rises does anything like the money The Dark Knight did, there’s a next-to-zero chance the studio lets five years go by without taking another swing at the ol’ piñata, so we were thinking: Who could take over the franchise?One of the things that Nolan taught us is that a filmmaker who brings his own distinctive voice and style to a movie—even a big summer tentpole movie full of explosions—is a good thing. The Batman mythology is full of those; every director since Tim Burton has left a very distinct visual mark on the franchise (even if a couple of those can be more accurately described as “welts” or “scars” rather than marks), and it seemed important to understand that the next director will be starting anew with the series. The likelihood of Nolan—who’s producing and consulting on the next Batman film, according to IMDb—allowing someone to waltz in and tell stories in his Dark Knight universe is pretty small and so chances are good that whoever takes over the franchise will have to create a new continuity, a new universe, a new voice and a new visual style more or less from scratch. So we’ve tried to come up with a group of directors whose previous work has shown them capable of doing that.These are not in order of preference, although we’ll say this: the first five are fantasies. There’s virtually no way you would see them doing a Batman film, but they’re mentioned because of what they could bring to the table and because they aren’t the Steven Spielberg-David Lynch style of fantasy where it could never happen in a million years. They’re theoretic