Christopher Nolan names his next Batman movie, confirms there won't be a Riddler

Christopher Nolan has confirmed that his third Batman film will be called The Dark Knight Rises. As the director hints in this typically careful interview with the L.A. Times, this may be significant for reasons besides maintaining the darkly dark tone of his last film: Nolan has said that the title The Dark Knight was just as much a reference to Harvey Dent, and again he confirms that this film will use “many of the same characters as we have all along”—which the LAT speculates could indicate that Nolan plans on bringing Dent back from the dead. Still, that would be an unusual move for Nolan, who’s very careful about keeping his Batman movies as realistic as possible, give or take a catastrophic destruction of an entire public transit system to catch one bad guy every now and then.

What Nolan can confirm is that said bad guy will not be The Riddler, which renders all those months’ worth of wild casting rumors and comment board speculation as utterly meaningless drivel. All that time wasted—what was it all for? Anyway, while Nolan still won’t say whom The Dark Knight will be rising against, exactly, he has confirmed that he’ll be introducing some new characters. One of those will, of course, be played by the recently confirmed Tom Hardy, while another will be a female lead played by one of the many actresses Nolan has been meeting with this week. None of them will be played by Robin Williams.