Batman, Nightwing, and Superman

In the comics when Bruce Wayne is too old to continue as Batman, Robin (now a full adult) continues crime fighting as a character known as Nightwing.

In "The Dark Knight Rises," Joseph Gordon Levitt plays a police officer in the film – one of the good guys who is helping Commissioner Gordon. We find out that he is an orphan and was raised mostly in a boy’s school that is no longer being funded by Wayne Enterprises. By the end of the movie he has lost a lot of his idealism for the police force, so he leaves. He goes somewhere and he picks something up. The woman who services him (I think it’s the boy’s school) tells him that she prefers his real name…Robin.

So, there's a chance that the Batman legacy will go on for WB by not-reinventng Batman but using the same kind of character (Nightwing). I can see them doing this until they ever come up with another Batman-capable director and story to launch a new Dark Knight. Do I really think Warner Bros. will head in this direction? In a word, no. I cannot really imagine the studio striding upon the sacred ground laid out by Nolan. The opportunity is there, but I can't actually imagine anyone touching it.

Only ten years elapsed from the first Spider-Man film was released until this new re-boot. Ten years (or maybe less) would be sufficient for a lot of people to have a hazy memory of Nolan's Batman, making a reintroduction feasible. After ten years there would be a new generation of movie-goers who always prefer something new to something created before they came of age.

WB wants to do a Justice League of America film (to potentially earn the same kind of bucks as The Avengers), but nothing has been done yet (and it may never happen).

Meanwhile, they are hoping the Superman reboot will draw a large following. WB released a short teaser clip from "Superman: Man of Steel." (See below.)

Some people are comparing what they saw in the teaser to Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life." I hope this isn't the case because I found "Tree of Life" to be one of the most fatiguing films I can recall in recent memory.

I'm hoping that the clip was just edited in such a way as to be ... different. With Chistopher Nolan as an executive producer of the film, we're bound to be subjected to a different (no doubt darker image) of Superman. Whether that approach will appeal to Superman fans is open for question.