The Dark Knight: Christian Bale Says He’d Return as Batman On One Condition

The shadow of The Batman never fades – as Christian Bale knows all too well by now. The Oscar-winning actor only played Batman for director Christopher Nolan’s epic Dark Knight Trilogy saga and hung up the cowl thereafter. In one of the latest interviews that Bale has done, he let it be known that as far as he’s still concerned, he’s done with the Batman Universe – including the ever-convoluted DC Multiverse that Warner Bros. Discovery is still trying to sort out. 

“The thing for me is that Chris Nolan and I always said, If we’re lucky enough to do three, we’ll do three and leave it at that,” Christian Bale told Inverse. “We were lucky enough to do three and stay true to our word. That’s loyalty. You’ve got to stick to a deal. If Chris came to me and said, ‘I’ve got a new story,’ I’d be interested. But other than that, I don’t think so.”

While it seems like Christian Bale will never fully be done with the question of whether or not he’ll ever do another Batman performance, there is an actual reason to be asking right about now. For the past year, DC movie fans have heard repeated rumors about how Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton were both suiting back up to play Batman in new DC Films projects, including The Flash, Batgirl, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. The idea of films like The Flash hopping around the DC Multiverse filled a lot of fans with hope that Bale’s version of Batman could be included as some sort of crowd-stopping cameo. However, Bale has been almost religiously steadfast in his condition for putting on the cowl again.

For instance, when Comicbook.com talked to Christian Bale before the release of Thor: Love & Thunder, he gave the same answer about a Batman return to us, almost verbatum: 

“For me, that would be a matter of Chris Nolan, if he ever decided to do it again and if he chose to come my way again, then yeah, I would consider it because that was always our pact between each other is we would just stick to it. We said we would only ever make three. And then I said to myself, and I’d only ever make it with Chris.”

In reality, Christian Bale’s answer is a non-answer, as anyone familiar with the story of The Dark Knight Trilogy knows full well that the only bigger holdout than Bale is Nolan himself. The chances of it happening remain in the “slim-to-never” category, with little sign of changing.

Batman will next be seen onscreen next year in both The Flash and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.