The Dark Knight is the ultimate Batman movie and one of the greatest films ever made, but it might not have happened if Christopher Nolan hadn’t seen a certain iconic HBO crime drama. Nolan was already an acclaimed filmmaker after helming Memento, Batman Begins, and The Prestige, but The Dark Knight is the bona fide blockbuster that made him a household name and paved the way for Inception, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer. The gritty realism of The Dark Knight ended up influencing the next wave of blockbusters, but The Dark Knight itself was influenced by a previous seminal work.
Now that The Dark Knight trilogy is defined by its grounded tone, it can be jarring to go back and watch Batman Begins, because it’s an old-school adventure movie that leans into the comic-booky elements of the lore. Nolan was inspired to pivot away from that comic-booky approach to a grittier, more realistic style after watching a groundbreaking drama series on HBO. If he hadn’t seen the show, his Batman trilogy could’ve turned out very differently.
The Wire Was A Huge Inspiration For Jonathan And Christopher Nolan Ahead Of The Dark Knight
The Nolan Brothers Wanted To Recreate The Wire’s “Fully Naturalistic World” In Gotham
When his Fallout TV show was released in 2024, The Dark Knight’s co-writer Jonathan Nolan — brother of Christopher — appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast for an interview. The host, Josh Horowitz, asked about how the Nolan brothers went about developing a sequel to Batman Begins after the reboot’s success. Nolan named two major influences on The Dark Knight: Michael Mann’s L.A.-set crime epic Heat, which is widely recognized as having inspired the gritty realism of the movie, and the classic HBO drama The Wire, which is a much lesser-known influence.
The Wire ran for five seasons on HBO and can be streamed now on Max.
Although it’s been hailed as quite possibly the greatest TV show ever made, The Wire struggled to find an audience throughout its entire run. But Jonathan Nolan had seen the first season and promptly recommended it to his brother. After they’d taken a very comic-booky approach to Batman Begins, not shying away from the more heightened elements of the mythos (like the Scarecrow’s fear toxin), Nolan thought it would be interesting to take a more grounded approach to the sequel. This was inspired by the “fully naturalistic world” that David Simon had crafted in The Wire.
Per Nolan, “Every beat feels plausible and real, keenly observed and naturalistic, but by the end, you’ve seen a Greek opera.”
Simon had served as a crime reporter in Baltimore before creating The Wire, so the series had an almost journalistic sense of realism — it often played like a fly-on-the-wall documentary — but, at the same time, it was compelling drama. Per Nolan, “Every beat feels plausible and real, keenly observed and naturalistic, but by the end, you’ve seen a Greek opera.” He described Simon’s work on The Wire, telling a modern Greek tragedy with documentary-like realism, as “a bit of a magic trick.” He wondered, “Could you bring that feeling into the Batman universe?”
The Wire’s Influence Is All Over Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight
They Both Make The City The Main Character
It’s easy to see how The Wire influenced The Dark Knight. In both stories, the city is the main character. Baltimore is the star of The Wire and Gotham is the star of The Dark Knight. The sprawling ensemble exists to show the corruption within that city. Rather than just telling a shallow, archetypal cops-and-crooks story, The Wire and The Dark Knight both dig a little deeper to explore the institutional problems that lead to high crime rates. The film’s morally gray portrait of the pros and cons of vigilantism is reminiscent of The Wire’s best character, Omar Little.
The Wire Deserves More Love For Changing The Crime Genre Forever
The Wire Revolutionized The Police Procedural
The Wire gets plenty of praise as one of the greatest TV shows ever produced, but it deserves more credit for breaking new ground in the crime genre. By the time Simon created The Wire, the tropes of police procedurals — and the crime genre at large — were well-established, but none of them were rooted in reality. Simon had spent years observing and chronicling real-life police procedures and investigations, so he ditched those tropes and made The Wire a different kind of police procedural. A lot of subsequent crime movies and TV shows, including The Dark Knight, took note.
Source: Happy Sad Confused
10/10
- Release Date
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2002 – 2008-00-00
- Network
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HBO
- Showrunner
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David Simon
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Dominic West
Jimmy McNulty
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Lance Reddick
Cedric Daniels
