So now that Christopher Nolan has gotten his decades-long passion project Inception out of the way, work is beginning to ramp up for the inevitable third chapter in his mind-numbingly brilliant Batman saga. As a director who is at the helm of a tent pole franchise of one of the biggest studios, I think Nolan has been very smart about stepping away between each Batman film to make a totally different, unrelated film. This not only allows the filmmaker to recharge his batteries, elevate his craft and not get burnt out, but it also allows audiences to get to the point where they’re really ready for another film as opposed to having one rammed down their throats when the taste of the last film (good or bad) is still in their mouths.

As many of you know, I made no attempt to tone down my ragingly deep romantic feelings about The Dark Knight. Not only was that film my favorite of 2008, it’s one of my favorite films of all time. Personally, I feel like that film really separated Nolan into a playing field of his own, and it demonstrated that not only is he capable of making great sequels, he just might be the guy to make a third film in a series that can rise above the things that generally make third chapters in a lot of trilogies the weakest one.

Nolan ended The Dark Knight on possibly one of the best cliffhanger endings I’ve ever seen, and while you get a little taste of where the third film is probably going to go thematically, at this point Nolan and his brother are probably still the only ones who know where it’s going to go.

As a screenwriter myself, I thought it’d be fun to make up my own direction for where the film could go. Although I’m doing this purely for shits and giggles, I do want to take a moment to warn Christopher Nolan that if he reads this column and steals any of my ideas, there will be consequences. Even though he’s one of my favorite directors, and even though a majority of his body of work are some of my favorite films, and even though he is one of my biggest influences as a writer/director, and even though Batman 3 is at the top of my excitement list, I won’t hesitate for one moment to send vicious bloodthirsty lawyers after him if I think for one second that he’s stolen any of my ideas from this column.

On second thought, he can probably afford better lawyers than me. Never mind Chris, I was just … er… joking. Ahem.

Anyway here’s my fun little Batman 3 experiment idea: At the end of The Dark Knight, Batman takes responsibility for Harvey Dent’s killing spree in order to save all the work he had achieved up until then, thus making himself a wanted murderer. You get the impression that Batman is now going to be considered a bad guy, and whoever the villain is will probably appear to everyone else as a good guy. Well, what if instead of that, the villains were kid versions of the Riddler, Penguin and Catwoman? The cute little loveable villain team captures the hearts of Gotham, and Batman is hired by Commissioner Gordon to babysit them. Then you could throw in some screwball comedy as the kids run around the Batcave trashing everything while Batman runs around after them. Then we do a scene where it’s Bruce Wayne’s birthday and Alfred hires a stripper to jump out of cake, but when the stripper pops out, it’s Robin with nothing on but the little black mask over his eyes and a red G-string with the Robin logo on it. Then you could throw in a subplot where Bruce puts nipples on the Batsuit that shoot tranquilizer darts or something, and to cap it off all we have do is find a place for a scene where Batman hits Commissioner Gordon in the face with a banana cream pie.

And, of course, at some point you have to use that music cue they play on TV when they show silly clips of animals. It’s already sounding better than The Dark Knight to me. But I guess even if Nolan doesn’t steal any of my ideas, the film will still probably be awesome.



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