Ok, okay, okay, okay.

Yes, as far as I know, we don’t know anything about Batman 3. I’m pretty sure I’ve said this multiple times over several crazy Batman 3 rumors (most recently with some Penguin fan art), but a few comments have been made over the first weeks of 2009 that open things up for creative and industry speculation.

I will attempt to collect and reconcile them within…

Evidence:

Dark Knight Producer Charles Roven said at the People’s Choice awards: “We have to separate the actors from the role. On a personal level, Heath was a friend of mine. We had worked together before ‘The Dark Knight,’ but I still think that ‘The Dark Knight’ is its own thing, and we have to separate them.”

Aaron Eckhart, who played Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight told reporters yesterday at the Golden Globes: “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.” 

Moviehole brings up some forgotten history concerning David Goyer’s Batman trilogy treatment that was talked up and down after Batman Begins: David Goyer told me a couple of years ago that it was always the plan to have the character feature in both “The Dark Knight” and the sequel that followed it. But he also said, at the time, that the plan was for Harvey Dent not to become Two-Face until the third film, so it goes without saying that things change, and things did.

I’ve been a proponent of the “Two-Face isn’t really dead” theory since the Dark Knight came out. My arguement is that despite the screenplay itself (HERE) describing Dent as dead after the fall ending The Dark Knight, the script itself was written with very plain examples of other, higher falls that the characters survived (more on my Two-Face thoery HERE).

Pair this up with a few conversations I’ve had with other fanboys about how to let the Joker elegantly exit the series without creating a CGI Heath Ledger, and things start to make production sense.

We do know that Chistopher Nolan and David Goyer has been “talking and thinking” about the sequel to The Dark Knight, even if that sequel doesn’t end up being Nolan’s next project, and that’s where speculation begins.

Is it happenstance that we hear the “talking and thinking” line from the same producer, in the same interview, as the suggestion that we, as fans, need to separate Ledger from The Joker? Is it another happy coiencidence that Aaron Eckhart’s usual dead-is-dead response has now become more nebulous?

If it is, we’ll never link to this post again. If it’s not, here’s how we’d do it if we were planning Batman 3:

Arkham.

Let’s go back to Arkham and show the new cells, holding The Joker and a sedated but alive Two-Face. Use them as devices to drive the plot. In Nolan’s universe, Batman is about to enter a difficult time where he is once again the enemy of the people. The only person who understands his duality is The Joker, and it’s possible that things get dark enough for Bruce that he’d even like to talk to The Joker…but the clown is in Arkham, and unless Jim Gordon is letting Bats sneak into a medical facility, The Joker is present, even desired, but unreachable.

In short, having the Joker featured in Batman 3 would be a mistake for common audiences. Get someone like Mark Hamil in to play the clown (he did the voice in the animated series), and you might get some good fan will, but most audiences will probably reject the character simply because it;s not Heath Ledger’s character. The time will come for The Joker to return (as with all properties, there are marketable villians and there are iconic villians), but film 3 isn’t for that.

On the other hand, Nolan’s series isn’t episodic, each volume allows us to learn something new about The Dark Knight, so disregarding The Joker would also be a mistake. Batman and The Clown Prince never go to settle their issues, and The Joker actually won if Harvey died.

Which is why The Joker wonders about the cell near him with the single question mark on the nameplate.

If Nolan and Goyer decide to jettison the Joker, they may need Harvey (Joker’s self-proclaimed wild card insturment of chaos) to fill in the story beats that The Joker would have if Heath Ledger was still alive.

I’m sticking to my guns: Harvey Dent isn’t dead. For a screenplay so tightly written, it seems odd that the Nolans would go to all the trouble of establishing real-life height physics, then allow Two-Face to fall on his head, breaking his neck off screen.

I don’t think anything has been decided, but I think Charles Roven knows that Nolan and Goyer are struggling with a way to answer unanswered questions, tell a story they want to tell and do something different, pushing Batman to the next level. I think he wants to make that as easy as possible for them (as any producer should), and is actively propping open doors this early in the story process.

There is no reason to think that these few stories are anything but coiencidence, but it does leave an interesting and logical option open: Joker, Two-Face or both might re-appear in the next Batman.