The Dark Knight Rises was supposed to be a fitting end – not just to Nolan’s trilogy as a story-arc, but also to this entire iteration of the character and universe – and yet many walked out of their screenings wondering what next for Nolan’s universe after the director offered a tantalising glimpse of something more beyond the end of his own trilogy. Rather than finality, Nolan encouraged his audiences to imagine what might happen after the credits rolled, with John Blake presumably left in charge of Gotham’s safety and Bruce Wayne riding off into the sun-set with his feline new best friend for life in tow.

Reboots are far from as necessary as film-making studios might have us believe: there is actually very little you can do in a reboot that can’t be just as easily handled in a sequel – look at The Amazing Spider-Man, a solid film which some have deemed a failure because it failed to dislodge Sam Raimi’s first two Spiderman movies as the best adaptations so far. That should have been the premier intention of that film, because rebooting inherently requires the surpassing of the original, otherwise the whole process is completely redundant.

Instead The Amazing Spider-Man introduced a new villain, a new love-interest and little to suggest that it couldn’t have simply been handled as a sequel. That would probably have been preferable approach, given that the retrodden areas were arguably the least successful parts of the film – in particular the origin story.

The Amazing Spider-Man could and should have been a lesson for the next Batman film – a parable of the unnecessary reboot. But instead – if the reboot goes ahead – we will have to drop those still potentially fruitful strands of The Dark Knight Rises, leaving our imaginations to fill in the blanks of that potential future, despite how bountiful a screen realisation of them could have been.

It’s a total cop-out – if Warner Bros decide that a reboot is the only way forward, as they seem to be leading us to believe, then they simply aren’t testing themselves as a creative force. And they should have killed off Nolan’s Batman literally as well as figuratively to close the door on any possible extensions. But in choosing not to, the studio have courted this sort of debate, whether they have stated their intention to reboot or not.

But then, why would Warner Bros want to reboot, when they have a mega-lucrative franchise on their hands, with an enormous amount of primary material to potentially adapt from the comic book world of Batman? And those aren’t the only reasons, so click within to reveal our ten reasons why Warner Bros would be crazy to reboot Batman…

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