With his stunning performance in The Fighter Christian Bale seemed to be moving away from the blockbuster stage of career, which included unmemorable turns in unmemorable movies like Public Enemies and Terminator: Salvation (plus an unmemorable turn in a very memorable movie, The Dark Knight). While he has to play Batman one more time for The Dark Knight Rises, and we can all look forward to that, I was hoping he might be done headlining $100 million movies. But does it count if the movie is in Chinese?

In what might be the most unexpected career move of all, Bale has signed on to star in Zhang Yimou's Nanjing Heroes, a $90-million budgeted movie that would rank as one of the most expensive China has ever produced, chronicling the 1937 invasion of Nanjing, China by Japanese troops. The invasion is frequently referred to in China as massacre, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Chinese citizens and the utter destruction of the city that had been a global capital before the war. According to THR Bale will play an American priest, perhaps inspired by the real-life German businessman John Rabe who helped protect more than 200,000 Chinese from slaughter. One of the reasons Rabe had the power to do that, though, was because of his status in the Nazi party, so it wouldn't surprise me to see Zhang fudge history in order to establish him as a less morally conflicted hero.

Bale apparently met with Zhang recently, and the director told THR he "was impressed with his serious book research for the role." The Nanjing massacre-- also referred to as Nanking--has been the subject of several documentaries and books recently, including 2007's exhaustive and moving documentary Nanking, which focused on Rabe. It's the kind of story that great epic films are made of, and with Nanjing Heroes planned to shoot 40% in English it's possible the movie will translate over to international audiences. Zhang, after all, directed 2002's small-scale hit Hero, so he's no stranger to making Chinese stories appeal beyond the country's borders. Having Batman in his cast this time probably won't hurt either.