Written By: Nick Poulimenakos

While the DCEU has a ton of films either confirmed or already in production, one film that Warner Bros. is really looking to get the ball rolling on is Matt Reeves’ The Batman. Despite the film having a totally new incarnation of the character, fans will always look back on how great the previous Batman was in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy and Reeves knows it.

Matt Reeves recently sat down with Yahoo! Movies to discuss War for the Planet of the Apes and his upcoming DCEU film where he spoke about how Nolan’s previous films inspired him as a director.

“What I love that [Nolan] did was that he took the genre seriously.” “What studios are willing to make at the moment is a very, very narrow band of films. What I discovered is that this genre has the potential to be about something more. You can use the metaphors of the genre to talk about [a lot].” “I think the other thing that I really admire in what [Nolan] did was knowing what it is to make a big studio film, which often can fall into that sense of committee filmmaking where there’s an anonymity to the point of view of the film.”

Reeves is definitely looking to Nolan’s films as a blueprint for what a superhero film be and how to properly embrace the source material he’s adapting. He then compares his hit Planet of the Apes films to the Batman character in which he says that both have massive premises but both are grounded with emotional stakes and characters.

“I think that the metaphors of both of the franchises [Batman and Apes] enable you to tell stories that have deep emotional resonance. That’s actually what excites me about it. It’s interesting because I was obsessed with both as a child, and yet there is something potentially very adult about what you can explore under the cover of that fantasy. That is what draws me to it, and that’s what I’m excited about.”

While The Batman currently has no release date, you can see Ben Affleck in the highly anticipated Justice League which comes out on November 17, 2017.