Batman: The Dark Knight writer David Goyer has responded to the comments from Man of Steel director Zack Snyder that Warner Bros. thought about having the two movie franchises take place in the same universe. As Goyer tells it, that was never really on the table, though Warner Bros. apparently wanted director Christopher Nolan to do more in the DC universe.

　　"Not amongst us when I was doing Man of Steel, or among Nolan and myself," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "[Director Christopher Nolan] always wanted to keep the Dark Knight films as a separate entity and [the studio] kept wanting, understandably, to pull him into a whole DC expanded universe. Chris obviously was a producer on Man of Steel, and it's tempting to think they were linked, but they really weren't. I mean, I'm sure one could retroactively do it."

　　Snyder said Warner Bros. considered putting Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight series in the same universe as Snyder's Superman movie Man of Steel, which released in 2013, one year after The Dark Knight Rises.

　　"It was not 100% off the table. We did talk about it a little bit," Snyder said.

　　Also in The Hollywood Reporter's interview, Goyer briefly discussed how Joker might have factored in to the story of The Dark Knight Rises if Heath Ledger was still alive. "Obviously, that would have completely changed the polarity of the third film," he said. "It's a logical assumption that the Joker would have been released [from Arkham prison], and it's certainly interesting to think of what would have happened if we had done that."

　　Goyer, who contributed to the story for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, is now making a sci-fi TV show for Apple called Foundation. Here's a new trailer.