The Dark Knight will return and we all know it. Whether it’s in five years, ten years or even longer than that, Batman will return to the big screen – and we all want him to as well. As good as Nolan’s trilogy has been and as long as it lives on in the memory, can we honestly say we don’t want the caped crusader to ever hit the silver screen again?
Of course we do, which leaves the question of who should play him. Nobody is going to be totally satisfied with any name discussed for the role but ten years ago many would have questioned Christian Bale.
If Bale’s career draws a neat comparison to anyone’s then its Michael Fassbender’s. In ‘Shame’ Dat Fass played a top tier businessman with a fractured psyche much like Bale’s in ‘American Psycho’ and both punished their bodies for the sake of their craft in ‘The Machinst’ and ‘Hunger’. It’s a bit of an obvious pick however and he may well be too famous for the role. Superheroes are rarely played by A-listers – though many do become them.
Whoever the next Bruce Wayne is, in my opinion he needs to be played by somebody in their 30s. It’s hard to believe in as grizzled and damaged a soul as Batman’s when it resides in a young man. He needs to be older and more weathered, which also plays into my belief that the next Bat-series should side-step the origin and begin with the vigilante’s career already in full swing.
A number of names struck me with their potential: there’s Joel Edgerton (‘Warrior’, ‘The Thing’), Liev Shreiber (‘X-Men Origins’, ‘Defiance’), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (‘Watchmen’, ‘Texas Killing Fields’) and even Idris Elba (‘Prometheus’, TV’s ‘The Wire’), who despite the obvious controversy it would cause, is clearly enough of a badass to play Batman…