Unfortunately for whichever director takes on the considerable burden of either continuing or rebooting Nolan's strand of the Batman universe (my heart says the former, my head the latter), the spectre of the departed director will loom large over anything and everything they create. Because regardless of how many things The Dark Knight Rises got wrong (and there weren't just a few), Nolan's treatment of the property was a phenomenal success, and it will take an awful lot for fans to forget and move on to lavishing the new projects with as much love. The new Batman film will be immediately shackled by those massive and unreasonable expectations, and that can only spell disaster for its director, because the natural antidote to inflated expectation is making everything bigger and bolder than before. Nolan was lucky, because he was picking up a broken franchise, dusting it off and rebooting it with a damn sight more subtlety and finesse than the over-bloated mess that was Batman & Robin. In truth, he could have made something of the quality of Batman Forever, and he would still have been deemed a success, because it's all a matter of relativity, which is exactly why the next Batman director is going to struggle to meet the expectations that will come with the gig. Batman needs a huge event to push Nolan out of fans' minds, and unfortunately the likelihood of a reboot simply doesn't fill me with confidence that it will be possible.