Warner Bros. had little reason to regret letting Christopher Nolan reign supreme over the Batman franchise and character for his full trilogy—it pulled record numbers in ticket sales. Yet as Nolan's success garnered him further clout and creative control, the studio found themselves with a creator determined to tell a closed loop story of Batman, within a seemingly self-contained universe. He explains this clearly in an interview with Scott Foundas on filmcomment.com:

For me, The Dark Knight Rises is specifically and definitely the end of the Batman story as I wanted to tell it, and the open-ended nature of the film is simply a very important thematic idea that we wanted to get into the movie, which is that Batman is a symbol. He can be anybody, and that was very important to us. Not every Batman fan will necessarily agree with that interpretation of the philosophy of the character, but for me it all comes back to the scene between Bruce Wayne and Alfred in the private jet in Batman Begins, where the only way that I could find to make a credible characterization of a guy transforming himself into Batman is if it was as a necessary symbol, and he saw himself as a catalyst for change and therefore it was a temporary process, maybe a five-year plan that would be enforced for symbolically encouraging the good of Gotham to take back their city.

Frankly, as a fan of the "Batman mythos," I found myself straining against the interpretation not due to it closing the loop on the end of the character, but its contention that Batman of the Nolan universe went into reclusive hiding between the second movie and the third. In the Nolanverse, a fantastic number of Batman's iconic villains are removed from his story. There was never a window of time in which for them to appear and face Batman. This is indeed the kind of "comic-fan-only concern" that movie adaptations have been casting aside for years, in an admittedly legitimate quest to reign these fantastical universes into something that feels grounded and believable to the general audience. Nolan's vision includes a very "movie-like" desire to own the entirety of its characters' story arcs.

Two-Face's brilliantly written, perfectly devastating rampage in The Dark Knight is a great example... in that it lasted a day and ended in his death.

2008 was the year that The Dark Knight Rises was released in theaters, and the culmination of Nolan's trilogy pulled in record box office numbers for Warner Brothers Pictures, but didn't quite reach the record-setting heights set by its predecessor The Dark Knight. That same year, Marvel Studios debuted their work and united vision in Iron Man, laying the groundwork for the movie that would eventually shatter that record.



The L.A. Times quoted part of Zack Snyder's San Diego Comic-Con announcement of Batman V Superman, and at the risk of over-interpreting, his quote clearly seems to indicate that the direction and mission of the team-up movie as an studio directive. I suppose it's a lot of gravitas to assign to a quote about looking "for a way to tell this thing," but to me it reveals signs of external story ideas or mandates coming to Snyder:

“I know there’s been a lot of speculation about what we’re doing,” the Man of Steel director teased the audience when he took the stage at the end of the Warner Bros. panel. “It’s official that we are going to make another Superman movie.… I sort of pored through the DC universe to look for a way to tell this thing … and I came across a thing that I feel sort of sums it up.”

Queue the line reading from The Dark Knight Returns. Having just completed Man of Steel for Warner Bros., speculation was widespread about Snyder's (and Superman's) next direction being determined by "disappointing" returns of the Superman reboot. Another site aggregating box office revenues for the category, the-numbers.com, helpfully reports revenues normalized for ticket price inflation. Although that adjustment certainly doesn't cover all the ways the span of years between the various films influenced their reception, it nonetheless indicates that Man of Steel showed an impressive debut. The DCEU debut placed above Fox's X-Men and WB's own Batman Begins, both of which proceeded to spawn successful movie franchises... with the benefit of their respective studios' faith in pursuing a direct sequel.

Man of Steel earned triple the gross of 2011's Green Lantern, and yet articles still led DC fans to brace for another dangling, abandoned franchise adaptation.