Speak­ing to MTV, Nolan answered ques­tions about Bat­man 3, specif­i­cally, is a July 2012 pre­mière and March 2011 film­ing on the cards?

Nolan answered,

“Yes and no, I sup­pose, would be the answer. We know we would be aim­ing for 2012, and that’s been talked about, but we’re just work­ing on the script really. My brother’s been hard at work on it for quite some time, based on a story that myself and David Goyer have written.”

The skinny is, there is no news. No script, no cast­ing, noth­ing. Bat­man 3, or The Dark Knight sequel, how­ever you wish to refer to it, will not be made before 2011. Though he did rule out Johnny Depp.

“There is nobody, there’s no script, there’s noth­ing. […] It can’t pos­si­bly be made before 2011 because ‘Incep­tion’ is such a big picture.”

[…]

“Johnny Depp is great in any­thing, but there is no Johnny Depp in this Bat­man. They tell me in no uncer­tain terms.“

Just to pro­vide you with a bit of con­text for The Dark Knight sequel, Warner Bros. have announced that Chris Nolan’s next movie, “Incep­tion”, will be released on July 26th 2010. This falls in direct com­pe­ti­tion with Marvel’s Thor movie.

As expected, and in fol­low­ing the Bat­man Begins to The Dark Knight jour­ney, Christo­pher Nolan is tak­ing some time out from Bat­man to pur­sue another movie — “Incep­tion”. Do not fret, The Pres­tige was filmed between the first two Bat­man movies and this cer­tainly does not rule Nolan out from a third movie. What’s more, Warner Bros. are pro­duc­ing “Incep­tion”, keep­ing every­one happy.

“Incep­tion” is billed as “a con­tem­po­rary sci-fi actioner set within the archi­tec­ture of the mind”, with an orig­i­nal screen­play by Nolan it plans to begin shoot­ing this sum­mer with a sum­mer 2010 release in mind.

Bear­ing this news in mind, the ear­li­est point at which pro­duc­tion on The Dark Knight sequel might begin is Sum­mer 2010, and with pro­duc­tion tak­ing approx­i­mately 14 months it could be late 2011 or Sum­mer 2012 before the caped cru­sader returns to theaters.

New Jersey’s Courier Post spoke to Bat­man Begins and The Dark Knight exec­u­tive pro­ducer Michael Uslan. He expects the third Chris Nolan Bat­man movie to make an appear­ance in 2011. This seems log­i­cal to us, fol­low­ing a sim­i­lar time frame as Begins to Knight — it gives the cre­ative team a chance to flesh out some ideas whilst allow­ing Nolan to have a break from the fran­chise for a year or so, per­haps to work on other projects (such as The Pres­tige).

Uslan will be onboard as exec­u­tive pro­ducer for the “Dark Knight” sequel, which he esti­mates will be [in] the­aters by 2011. As for the iden­tity of the next round of Batman’s supervil­lains and love inter­ests, Uslan remains tight-lipped. “It’s one of those deals where if I told you, I’d have to kill you,” he says with a chuckle.

From MTV:

“I think Har­vey — if he’s not dead — is in a seri­ous coma,” stated Eck­hart, “and I’m not sure he’s com­ing out. They might pull the plug on him.” Seem­ingly firm words, right? Except even the notion that his alter-ego is still alive is a clear depar­ture from pre­vi­ous state­ments where the actor was per­fectly fine con­firm­ing Harvey’s death at the busi­ness end of a freefalling drop.

We know from our recent inter­view with pro­ducer Charles Roven that screen­writ­ers Christo­pher Nolan and David Goyer have begun brain­storm­ing ideas for a third “Bat­man” film…could some­thing out of that have led to Eckhart’s about-face on Two-Face? His wink-wink-nod-nod answer seems to sug­gest that some­thing else may be at play.

Are MTV clutch­ing at straws here?

Seems like the tabloids are at it again, this time with rumors that Rachel Weisz will be play­ing Cat Woman, Shia LaBoeuf to play Robin and Eddie Mur­phy as The Rid­dler — where do they get this crap? Suf­fice to say, it’s all made up drivel.

Time to get some real voices on the sequel to The Dark Knight; Alan Horn, pres­i­dent of Warner Bros. has recently spo­ken with Col­lider:

We’ve been talk­ing to Chris Nolan and what we have to do is get him in the right place and have him tell us what he thinks the notion might be for a great story, but Chris did a great job and we’d love to have him come back and do another one.”

As far as the tim­ing of the project, he went onto say: “The story is every­thing and we are very respect­ful of Chris. We have a won­der­ful rela­tion­ship with him and we are going to be respect­ful of his tim­ing and we want to get it right. Also, I think the fans expect that – they want us to make a ter­rific movie – we have to give them another great movie.”

Christo­pher Nolan has been speak­ing with USA Today about the suc­cess of The Dark Knight and its poten­tial sequel:

Nolan says he is jot­ting notes and doing some rough out­lines for a third story, but he hasn’t yet found any­thing he’s will­ing to com­mit to film, despite Warner Bros.’ eager­ness to get a new film underway.

“It was obvi­ous when the box office was so big ($530 mil­lion domes­ti­cally) that we had under­es­ti­mated how ready fans were to reboot the fran­chise,” he says. “The worst thing you could do now that you’ve got­ten the plane back in the air is mess up the landing.”

[Talk­ing about sequels and a third movie] “I don’t know why they’re hard to do,” Nolan says. “Maybe there’s so much expec­ta­tion to them. But I wouldn’t want to do one if it weren’t going to be as good as the first or sec­ond. That’s not respect­ful to the fans.“

Nolan also points out his rea­sons for not putting out­takes or deleted scenes on the DVD — not a sin­gle extra scene involv­ing The Joker:

Nolan says he wasn’t keep­ing deleted scenes from fans. “For my past three films, I really haven’t had scenes that didn’t make it in the movie,” he says. “If it’s in the final script, I tend put it on screen.”

Any out­takes, how­ever, were inten­tion­ally left off the DVD. “I don’t like out­takes or gag reels,” Nolan says. “I don’t think it’s respect­ful to the actors, who signed on to have their per­for­mance on screen, not the takes that didn’t work out. It dis­cour­ages actors from going all-out if they think every mis­take is going on the disc.”