Is Christopher Nolan’s new movie Inception going to be as big as The Dark Knight? Unless Leonardo DiCaprio turns up dead right before it’s released, no.

But is Inception going to be as good as The Dark Knight? Could be. Inception isn’t out for another year, so the trailer isn’t very helpful, but it does show a bunch of people tumbling around a corridor in a deadly-looking way – much like how the music video to Virtual Insanity by Jamiroquai looks in our dreams – so we’ve already got high hopes for it.

Watch the Inception trailer after the jump…

But most of all, the world wants Christopher Nolan. But since this is Christopher Nolan – a man who once made an entire film about Al Pacino being quite sleepy – he isn’t making the Batman 3 talk easy.

Promoting The Dark Knight’s DVD release, Nolan reiterated that the pressure of following such a huge movie might cause him to foul the sequel up. Well, Christopher, that didn’t stop Sam Raimi from making Spider-Man 3, and that was… um, OK, let’s move on.

Although there’s obviously a lot of talk about Heath Ledger at the moment – most notably how his indelible interpretation of The Joker could easily win an Oscar next year – The Dark Knight really only created one star.

No, not Aaron Eckhart – all he did model his face on Posh Spice and do a rubbish Skeletor voice. And not Morgan Freeman, either – regardless of whether he’s playing a technological wizard or a retired child kidnapper he can still only really play Morgan Freeman. And we refuse to take Christian Bale seriously as Batman until someone gives him a bloody Strepsil.

No, the real star of The Dark Knight was Christopher Nolan – not only did he manage to make a superhero movie into a dark, rich, morally ambiguous thriller with a completely noncommercial ending, but he managed to make it more popular than any movie ever barring Titanic. And that takes some doing.

So, while some people are caught up in the trivialities of whether Johnny Depp will play The Riddler in Batman 3 – or whether Cher will play Catwoman – the real question is whether Christopher Nolan wants to direct it or not.

So far Nolan has been fiercely coy on the matter, noting that he hasn’t been signed up to direct Batman 3 and that he didn’t want to go down the traditional route of third superhero movies and write a script that sees the hero turn evil because either a) Richard Pryor accidentally turned a woman into a robot or b) he got sad because Kirsten Dunst danced and cooked eggs at the same time, depending on whether you’ve just watched Superman III or Spider-Man 3.

But that was a few months ago – surely Christopher Nolan has changed his mind about Batman 3 by now! Surely! Surely, USA Today? You know! Tell us what he said, USA Today:

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

Oh, you big bloody cocktease, Nolan. You know as well as anyone that The Dark Knight was such a huge success that Batman 3 is going to happen regardless of whether you make Batman 3 and follow the series through to the graceful, elegant conclusion you’ve envisioned for it or whether Warner Brothers gets Schumacher back onboard to give everyone giant nylon codpieces and a script that’s 98% pun. Which one would you prefer?

We can see right through Christopher Nolan’s little plan here. The more he appears to wring his hands about Batman 3, the more people like us will clamour for him to make it. And then, when Christoper Nolan ends up making Batman 3 into a gigantic dogturd that climaxes with Christian Bale kissing Cher with tongues inside a helicopter flying away from a burning building, he can look back and say that it was all our fault. Which it will be. Arse.

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The next time he was in court was for a space-camp lawsuit, and the time after that it was because Catwoman smacked him really hard with a bull-whip once. It was in the middle of a battle. The judge sided with the lady, possibly because she was all leathered-up.

But as anybody who has ever sued judicially knows, three lawsuits are never enough. That’s why Batman is currently sticking it to Christopher Nolan for getting all up in his business and ruining the awesome life he once had. Wait – did we say ‘..he once had’? Because we meant to say ‘..it once had.’ The Batman in this case is some crappy city in Turkey.

There was a time not so long ago that in the city of Batman, Turkey, a guy could really be a guy. You could walk down the street with half a pig slung over your shoulder, chewing chunks off it whenever you’d see fit. And the best part was – nobody would even say anything – because they were all publicly chomping half-pig too.

Then Christopher Nolan decided to destroy a good thing. He swooped in with his stupid Batman movies and turned Batman movies into such a tourist hot-spot that the city council soon ruled people could only indulge in their dead swine behind closed doors, or in their backyards.

Well the city’s good mayor doesn’t like this one bit – and he plans to personally take Christopher Nolan to task over this. Here’s part of the story straight off of a Turkish news website called Hurriyet.com:

“The royalty of the name ‘Batman’ belongs to us … There is only one Batman in the world. The American producers used the name of our city without informing us,” Kalkan told to the Doğan news agency. Batman is a centuries old city, taking root in the Neolithic age but becoming significant when oil was found in the region at the end of 1940s. Almost a decade before that, Batman was created as a comic hero. Kalkan is going to sue Christopher Nolan, the director of the latest Batman movie “The Dark Night,” not DC Comics, the creator of the superhero.

It’s unknown whether the Mayor will sue in the American court system, or perhaps more locally from the big green barn located at the intersection of Main St & First South there in Batman’s financial district.

The only thing known for absolute certain is that Nolan will probably lose, and perhaps as lawsuit-payment the city will just want a production credit strong enough to make a noticeable difference in Batman 3. Like maybe Gotham could be  a suburb of Turkish Batman. Also maybe the superhero could use his numerous resources to wreak vengeance on the unholy Kurds that clog the world’s sewers with their inferior religious belief system.

Also maybe they could work Phillip Seymour Hoffman into the script. Yes, that would all blend quite nicely.

It’s common knowledge that Christopher Nolan hasn’t signed on to direct Batman 3 yet, but now we’re starting to hear whispers that he’s probably never going to make Batman 3, probably because he wants to make loads more weird little films about David Bowie inventing electricity or something.

This rumour that Batman 3 will be directed by someone other than Christopher Nolan is actually quite worrying – not only because his work on The Dark Knight took intelligent popcorn hits to a dramatic new level, but also because he apparently wanted Cher to play Catwoman, and who wouldn’t want to see a big-haired pensioner wriggling around in a skin-tight latex leotard, right? Right? Hello? Anyone?

Everyone knows The Dark Knight was good. It was so good that it made Christian Bale go mental on his mum. It was so good that it made Morgan Freeman crash his car with an illicit ladyfriend in the passenger seat. It was even so good that we’re prepared to overlook Batman’s silly voice and that nonsense about tracking people’s mobile phones in it.

It was, in short, so good that everyone is desperate for Batman 3. We’d even be able to put up with a Batman 3 that starred Cher and Johnny Depp so long as Christopher Nolan directed it. Make no mistake – Christopher Nolan is vital to Batman 3.

Which is why it’s a pain in the arse that he’s probably not going to direct it. During his big interview about Two-Face being dead recently, Aaron Eckhart also happened to let out this little nugget of information:

“He never said he’s going to make another one. I’m sure they drove the Brinks truck up to his house and dumped money on his lawn. But I think Chris wants to go out and make other movies, too. And he should. He’s an independent filmmaker at heart. He’s got a lot of ideas.”

The News Of The World, which never makes stuff like this up, expanded on the claim yesterday by suggesting that Christopher Nolan won’t make Batman 3 because he can’t do it without Heath Ledger. But that’s rubbish – he swapped Katie Holmes for Maggie Gyllenhaal between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight and that formula worked pretty well, so all he needs to do is find a new Joker with a weirder-looking face and he’ll be away.

Of course, with The Dark Knight being the massive runaway success that it is, Batman 3 is an inevitability whether or not Christopher Nolan chooses to direct it. But if he doesn’t, we’d personally like to vouch for Tyler Perry. It sounds like a weird choice, but it’s the only way that our dream of seeing a tall, overweight transvestite Batman dishing out folksy self-help soundbites to criminals will be realised. Who’s with us?

No, not struck down another member of the cast or crew with the ‘curse’, which is apparently floating around these days. The film has gone and broken the record for the fastest $400 million in box office history, making the money in a frankly ridiculous 18 days.

Imagine making four hundred million dollars in 18 days. How many tricks you’d have to pull to draw in that amount… it’s hard to take in. Though it would also be hard to take in if you pulled $400 million-worth of tricks, let’s be honest here.

But at least it shows that maybe, just maybe, Christopher Nolan’s film is living up to its reputation, even with the extra bits of accidental hype popping up here and there.

The previous record time in which the fabled $400 million mark was crossed – as you should all know too well – was a pathetic 43 days by Shrek 2. More than four hundred million for doing a crap Scottish accent? Ruddy hell.

But in less than half the time it took for a CG ogre voiced by an irritating comedy hack to reach the milestone – just over two weeks – The Dark Knight has taken its place in box office history, climbing up the highest US earners top 10 as fast as it’s cast can make headlines through their exploits, incidents and accidents.

Surely this means Hollywood will adopt the same technique for every new major movie release, pushing their leading stars into compromising positions for the sake of a few extra headlines. It worked very well here, and the world of film is surely cynical enough to see it as a viable strategy to affect the home lives of its stars.

Unless we’re being unnecessarily harsh here. Which we aren’t.

If the movie fatcats aren’t quite that cynical, they’ll probably just adopt a new film-making strategy to rake in the speedy $400 million. Said strategy will probably involve making every single big budget summer movie the most depressing, dark and downright unsettling thing known to man, while at the same time putting a welsh bloke in a weird costume and making him speak in a frankly ridiculous manner when wearing said costume.

It’s a definite recipe for success, if you simply follow the trail of facts staring you in the face.

We do have one real hope from all of this though, and that is to see The Dark Knight overtake Titanic as the highest grossing movie of all time. Meaning whenever we hear about the film that brought home the most clams we won’t have to be reminded of the time James Cameron went mad and made one of the worst films ever. Starring a sprout.