Christopher Nolan bashes contemporary superhero films

Christopher Nolan is glad that he helmed the iconic Dark Knight Trilogy when he did - the first installment Batman Begins being released exactly three years before Marvel released the blockbuster hit Iron Man and began treating superhero films as ‘engines of commerce.’

In a recent virtual interview with Entertainment Weekly senior writer Clark Collis, Nolan expressed frustration with increasing studio inference into the making of modern comic book films, something that he fortunately did not have to deal with.

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“It was the right moment in time for the telling of the story I wanted to do. The origin story for Batman had never been addressed in film or fully in the comics. There wasn’t a particular or exact thing we had to follow. There was a gap in movie history. Superman had a very definitive telling with Christopher Reeve and Richard Donner. The version of that with Batman had never been told. We were looking at this telling of an extraordinary figure in an ordinary world,” the director said.

After Martin Scorsese had famously declared that Marvel films are not ‘cinema,’ Nolan is one of few prominent filmmakers shedding light on the problems that came with the genre becoming hugely successful.

 “The other advantage we had was back then you could take more time between sequels,” Nolan added. “When we did Batman Begins, we didn’t know we’d do one and it took three years to do it and then four years before the next one. We had the luxury of time. It didn’t feel like a machine, an engine of commerce for the studio. As the genre becomes so successful, those pressures become greater and greater. It was the right time.”