Why Joseph Gordon-Levitt Isn’t Taking Over the Batman Empire

We’ve all seen The Dark Knight Rises by now, and know how it ends. The movie was actually left fairly open opened, but it’s pretty obvious how things are set up. Batman may or may not have escaped a nuclear blast, he’s probably retired over in Europe, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (aka Robin) is poised to inherit the batsuit.

But as Levitt explained to Howard Stern, he wasn’t upset to see that Ben Affleck will become Batman, because the Christopher Nolan Batmans were strictly going to be a trilogy, and that’s that. The next one will clearly be in its own universe. 

When Stern asked Levitt if there was any discussion of him taking over as Batman, Levitt said, “There wasn’t, no. Chris Nolan directed a trilogy. His plan was always to have three movies. He said, very specifically, The Dark Knight Rises will be the third and final story of this trilogy that I’m making, and I think it’s a really good ending, cause it talks about it throughout, that Batman is more than a man, it’s a symbol, and we all have a hero within us. So to have somebody else in the batcave at the end of that trilogy, not Bruce Wayne, I think is a really cool ending.”

Levitt apparently wasn’t surprised or upset that Ben Affleck will take over instead of him. “It’s a story that Chris Nolan told with those three movies, so I wasn’t expecting the next time Batman showed up it to be part of that Chris Nolan story.”