7. Sam Mendes
Sam Mendes has experience with comic book movies thanks to the Road for Perdition, but let's be fair: you know him as the guy who did Skyfall. Skilled with, again, bringing something new to an already familiar franchise, Mendes clearly has the skill and story telling genius to paint a new approach to the Dark Knight. Mendes's films are not particularly dark or gritty, but they do have a sense of adventure and largeness to them that has not been brought to Batman quite often enough. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises both attempted to make the films bigger (with the League of Shadows posing as international threats directing their attention toward a single city), but even in Rises, when Gotham fell, it never felt close to the sheer size or magnitude of, say, No Man's Land. Mendes can change that. He can make a huge, gigantic Batman film, mixing and matching elements from the largest scale Batman stories (No Man's Land, Knightfall, etc). The Nolan films failed to really express the scale of Batman's universe, often times focusing on the personal struggles of Bruce Wayne. The Burton/Schumacher films didn't seem to even realize there was a world beyond Gotham. In all cases, new is good.