The success of ‘The Dark Knight’ left Christopher Nolan staggered: “It’s mystifying “
These days, if a Christopher Nolan movie doesn’t perform like gangbusters at the worldwide box office, it’s seen as a flop.
Hell, the guy released Tenet during a worldwide plague, and it made more money at the box office than any other film except Bad Boys for Life. To give context, though, that Will Smith sequel banked most of its cash before cinemas shut down due to the pandemic, while Tenet was tasked with kick-starting the return to theatrical moviegoing. In those circumstances, $365million seems pretty darn good, but because Nolan comes with such high expectations, it was chalked up as a failure.
It wasn’t always like this for Nolan, though. Before he began making more money than most blockbusters with original movies like Inception, Interstellar, and Oppenheimer, Nolan was a young filmmaker who had modest hits with the indie crime movie Memento and the mid-level studio thriller Insomnia. It was only with his fourth feature film that he catapulted into the tentpole arena, and the critical and commercial reaction to that movie revolutionised the way Hollywood approached large-scale filmmaking.
That film was, of course, Batman Begins, and in 2005, its $375million box office run (equivalent to around $622million today) was considered a substantial goddamn hit. Of course, Warner Bros also saw it as a great platform to continue the franchise to greater heights, but few people at the studio, nor Nolan himself, could have anticipated what would happen when The Dark Knight hit cinemas in 2008.
While Batman Begins was nothing but fucking gold, The Dark Knight was something else entirely: a cultural phenomenon that made $1.009billion at the box office, plus untold riches in merchandising revenue. The ‘Batmania’ that surrounded Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman had been reborn, and suddenly, everyone in the world was obsessed with the Caped Crusader and his arch-nemesis, The Joker, all over again.
For Nolan, that kind of astronomical success (equal to around $1.5billion today) was shocking, and he hadn’t seen it coming. After all, as of 2008, only three movies in history had previously cracked the billion-dollar mark: Titanic, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Nolan’s movie was in rarified air, and he knew his life, not to mention the expectations for his future movies, had changed dramatically overnight.
“I can’t get my arms around it, to be quite frank,” a shellshocked Nolan told The Los Angeles Times after the numbers came in. “It’s mystifying. It’s terrific, but at the same time, it’s a little abstract. The numbers are so big.”
Interestingly, Nolan claimed that the most satisfying thing for him wasn’t that the movie had been such a bonanza at the box office, or that his own asking price had just increased tenfold. Instead, he was happy that audiences seemingly loved Batman Begins so much that a feverish anticipation built steadily in the three years between it and The Dark Knight.
It’s sort of an impossible question to answer, but it’s worth asking: would the second film have been as big a hit in isolation? Nolan didn’t think so. “The Dark Knight stood on the shoulders of the first film,” he reasoned. “That was really exciting to see.” Then, with a slightly disbelieving smile, he concluded, “For it to become such a phenomenon is extraordinarily gratifying.”
