Christopher Nolan thinks “there are no good third sequels”, with one unlikely exception
When Christopher Nolan signed up to make 2005’s Batman Begins, he ensured his contract stipulated only one film. Even from the beginning, he didn’t want to get trapped in a deal with Warner Bros that would legally require him to make three Batman films from the outset.
Of course, Nolan wound up making the sequel, 2008’s The Dark Knight, but once again it was a one-and-done deal. According to the director, it only came about because he and his brother Jonah Nolan were able to craft a story they were passionate about telling.
By the time it came to the third entry in the series, though, Nolan’s return was far from a foregone conclusion. There were four years between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, and a lot of that delay was because Nolan wanted to make his passion project, Inception. However, he was also more reticent to make a third film than anyone at Warner had anticipated, and it was for one very good reason. As he told the Los Angeles Times in 2008, “How many good third movies in a franchise can people name?”
To Nolan, the job of making a good sequel was difficult enough, but he managed to pull off a magic trick with The Dark Knight, which was so incredible that many dubbed it an improvement on Batman Begins. The likelihood of him being able to repeat that trick with The Dark Knight Rises seemed like very long odds, and all he had to do was look at the slim list of good third entries in cinema history.
“There are no good third sequels, basically,” he told Tom Shone in The Nolan Variations. While some pernickety types might take issue with his wording here – wouldn’t the “third sequel” actually be the fourth movie? – Nolan’s point resonated. Third entries in a series that are worthy of what went before are rare, and even the good ones, such as Toy Story 3, The Bourne Ultimatum, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, are usually not considered a patch on their predecessors.
However, there was one third entry that stood out for Nolan, and considering the prestige usually attached to his filmmaking, it was an unlikely pick. After declaring there were no good third movies, Nolan conceded, “Rocky III, maybe.”
While Nolan’s appreciation for the third instalment of Sylvester Stallone’s beloved underdog boxing melodrama might have surprised some people, he is correct in his assessment of Rocky III‘s quality. The 1982 film became the highest-grosser of the franchise upon release, and audiences loved its tale of near-retirement Rocky Balboa being trained by his enemy-turned-friend Apollo Creed to battle the vicious Clubber Lang (Mr T).
Fascinatingly, though, Rocky III may have also inspired Nolan in how he would approach his third Caped Crusader flick. Stallone’s third Rocky film was markedly different from the first two in style and tone, moving away from the gritty realism of the ’70s and into the testosterone-fuelled, exaggerated tales of good vs. evil of the ’80s. Nolan realised a similar genre change was needed for The Dark Knight Rises, if the project was going to sustain his interest for the two years it would take to make the film.
“The first one is an origin story,” he explained to Shone. “The second one is a crime drama very much like Heat, and the third one, we needed to blow up bigger, because you can’t scale down…You’ve got to shift genres. We went for the historical epic, the disaster film—The Towering Inferno meets Doctor Zhivago.”
Who’d have thought you could get that from Stallone and Carl Weathers frolicking on a beach together?
