Talk­ing with MTV, David Goyer says that he already “knows the theme” for the third Bat­man movie, although he also reit­er­ates that a third movie is not set in stone and it could “go either way”.

“I think that’s the scari­est thing – to think, could we come up with a third movie that was as good as the first two? Can we top our­selves?” screen­writer David Goyer asked aloud, almost rhetor­i­cally, in a recent con­ver­sa­tion with MTV News. “Doing it a third time would be a big proposition.”

Make no mis­take about it, though, a third film HAS been dis­cussed, Goyer con­fessed, reveal­ing that, while noth­ing is con­crete, both a vil­lain and a theme have been bandied about.

“We’ve only talked loosely about it, though, Chris and I,” Goyer said.

Inter­est­ingly, it’s the theme, and not the vil­lain, that most inter­ests me, espe­cially given how the lat­ter seems inex­orably tied to the for­mer in this new mod­ern Bat­man uni­verse. (Fear the pre­dom­i­nant issue in “Begins” pre­cip­i­tat­ing the intro­duc­tion of Scare­crow, esca­la­tion in “Knight” sim­i­larly call­ing for The Joker.

The fact that Goyer has a theme he wants to keep in mind for a pos­si­ble “Bat­man 3” means he also has a direc­tion, a cri­sis, and, yes, a villain.

So what is it?

“I have one,” Goyer said laugh­ing. “But I’m not going to tell you. Chris is very par­tic­u­lar about that.

“I do think, though, that if there’s not a third film – these two movies stand on their own,” he added. “I think it could go either way.”

/Film have also spo­ken with Chris­t­ian Bale and Christo­pher Nolan about Bat­man 3 — every­thing is still up in the air:

Nolan: “I don’t know what I’d do next, or what would hap­pen next. I felt in doing a sequel that it would be a big mis­take to try to hold any­thing back for future films. You have to put every­thing you can into this movie and try and make it as great as it can be.”

Chris­t­ian Bale: “I always like to have to think when I’m leav­ing the the­ater. I do love any movie that leaves me ques­tion­ing what has hap­pened, what is going to hap­pen. I see that in fin­ish­ing the movie I want to know what will hap­pen, what is going to hap­pen. But it is com­pletely in the hands of Chris, weather he decides to do that or not. It will be a lot of money that he didn’t give you any indi­ca­tion if that was going to hap­pen or not? But it’s com­pletely his deci­sion. I can’t imag­ine doing this with­out Chris. I don’t even want to con­sider that because he’s cre­ated this. This is his.”

And in an older EW arti­cle, Bale says some­thing similar:

Inter­viewer: So do you think there will be a part 3 of Bat­man?
Chris­t­ian Bale: Um, look, let’s wait and see…

Inter­viewer: Or, I guess it’d be part 6.
Chris­t­ian Bale: No, no, no, no, no. [Smil­ing] Part 3 is what I’d con­sider it, yeah, I don’t say part 6. Bat­man begins — that was the begin­ning there, with all due respect to the oth­ers. We are re-creating this. You know, obvi­ously the deci­sion is out of my hands. I would, know­ing the Dark Knight story, I would like very much to com­plete a tril­ogy. And I think that know­ing the story of The Dark Knight, it leaves you antic­i­pat­ing some­thing that really can get very, very inter­est­ing for a third. Now, the ques­tion would be: Is Chris going to be doing it? Because to me I find it tricky to imag­ine work­ing on it with­out it being a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Chris.

Thanks BatGirl567!