Christian Bale has revealed why he committed to playing Batman no more than three times.
Before the days of the DC Extended Universe and prior to MCU really taking off, Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy was the best superhero franchise around. Christian Bale starred as Batman and in the critically-acclaimed The Dark Knight, Heather Ledger blew audiences away with his performance as The Joker.
Now, ahead of Robert Pattison’s Batman era, Christian Bale has explained why he turned down the opportunity to play Batman a fourth time.
“We never were arrogant to assume that we had an opportunity beyond one film at a time,” Bale told the Toronto Sun. “That’s something that Chris always would talk about. He’d say, ‘This is it. We’re making one film. That’s all we’ve got.'”
“Then when they came and said, ‘You want to go make another?’ It was fantastic, but we still said, ‘This is it. We will not get another opportunity.’ Then they came and they said, ‘OK, let’s do a third one. Chris had always said to me that if we were fortunate to be able to make three we would stop. ‘Let’s walk away after that.”
He added: “Then when they inevitably came to us and said, ‘How about a No. 4?’ I said, ‘No. We have to stick to Chris’ dream, which was always to, hopefully, do a trilogy. Let’s not stretch too far and become overindulgent and go for a fourth.'”
The Dark Knight is currently rated sixth in the IMDB top 250 movies of all time.
