The Dark Knight Rises takes place in the future!

Kinda! Christopher Nolan has shed a little light on his upcoming Batman sequel in a lengthy interview with Empire, revealing that it takes place almost a decade after the events of The Dark Knight.

Here’s the quote, captured by Slashfilm:

“It’s really all about finishing Batman and Bruce Wayne’s story. We left him in a very precarious place. Perhaps surprisingly for some people, our story picks up quite a bit later, eight years after The Dark Knight. So he’s an older Bruce Wayne; he’s not in a great state.”

That makes Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne about forty/forty-two years old by our calculations. We are getting closer and closer to the 55-year-old Batman of The Dark Knight Returns!

The first six minutes of The Dark Knight Rises will screen ahead of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, and will introduce Tom Hardy‘s villainous Bane.

In the same Empire piece, Hardy describes his character as “brutal”; as if the images we’ve seen of him so far didn’t already indicate that.//

The Dark Knight Rises also stars Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman. It arrives in Australian cinemas July 19, 2012.

Discuss: What are your thoughts on TDKR’s being set eight years after its predecessor?