This was posted yesterday on Darkhorizons.com, hopefully they don’t think that if Chris Nolan doesn’t continue on as director and overall lord and master of the new Batman series that things will be as high quality as the first two entries. I mean, look what happened to the original Batman series after Tim Burton left…sigh…some executives will never learn.

from darkhorizons.com:

“Batman” Films Will Continue On

By Garth Franklin Thursday February 5th 2009 11:57AM

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes says that he hopes the revived “Batman” franchise will have as long a life as the studio’s other big cash cow – the “Harry Potter” films.

“We look at Harry Potter. It’s fantastic to have franchises that last that long. We want to do that with Batman and Superman and perhaps Sherlock Holmes. The sequels are as good, with new characters added, as were the originals. That wasn’t the case in the years ago” said Bewkes during the company’s Q4 earnings call yesterday.

More major sequels are in order too – “Warners has more tentpoles as an on-going strategy that very much lifts its distribution and performance. We think that’s going to hold up our slate in the 2009 – 2010 period. We’ve got four more big tentpoles coming this year.”

This commitment comes despite the general impression that director Christopher Nolan’s third “Batman” feature, currently being discussed but still quite a few years off, will be his last.

Meanwhile he adds that the upcoming “Harry Potter”, “Terminator”, “Sherlock Holmes” and “Watchmen” are movies “we’re deeply excited about.” The studio itself announced a net loss of $16.03 billion for the period.

A full transcript of the call is up at Alley Insider.

Warner Bros. does have a lot of series, Harry Potter (which is coming to an end), Terminator (which is just restarting with Salvation), Sherlock Holmes and Watchmen (both of which are not tested yet to see if they have legs. But, lets wait until the next Batman movie comes out, we don’t even know if Nolan is making another one. And if he does, he doesn’t seem like the type of person to continue to make these franchise movies forever.

–Cos