Nolan: There was no such thing as a reboot before I made Batman Begins

Delusions of grandeur or just clumsy language? We assume we all know what director Christopher Nolan meant when he recently commented on the current reboot climate, but it sounded more shady than it probably was originally intended.

"It's a sign of how quickly things change in the movie business, but there was no such thing conceptually as a 'reboot.' That idea didn't exist when I came to look at Batman. That's new terminology. Warner Bros. owned this wonderful character, and didn't know what to do with it. It had sort of reached a dead end with its previous iteration.

If you look at what Tim Burton did, it's specifically about a world that was created that Batman fits into. It's this great Gothic vision that's very consistent, and consistent with the character of Batman. What I felt I hadn't seen, especially in comics, was an ordinary world in which we could be living in Gotham. When a Gothamite sees Batman, he's as extraordinary as he would be in our world. I wanted an extraordinary character in the background of an ordinary world. That isn't what Tim did, so I thought it was a whole other direction to go in."

If we just quickly try to remember the most notable reboots of the movie world before Nolan made Batman Begins, the following titles are some of the ones that come to mind, off the top of our heads; The Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, Godzilla, Planet of the Apes, Jack Ryan, Superman, King Kong and more. Now, maybe they weren't called "reboots" in the same way as they would be if they were released today, or what do you say?

Thanks, Filmcomment.com