Director Christopher Nolan has danced around Batman 3 almost since the first reel of The Dark Knight unspooled. There have been rumors and vague proclamations, but till now no one has even been able to confirm that Christopher Nolan will make another Batman movie, let alone actually start work on it any time soon.

Tonight though, now that Nolan’s done with Inception, the waiting is over. In an interview with MTV Chris confirms that not only do they have a release date picked out for the next Batman in 2012, he’s hard at work writing the script. He says, “We know we're aiming for 2012 [as a release date]. That's been talked about. We're just working on the script, really. My brother has been hard at work on it for quite some time. It's based on a story that myself and David Goyer have written.”

That’s the same trio that came up with the script for The Dark Knight and it sounds like they’re going about it in the same manner. David Goyer and Christopher Nolan came up with the story for The Dark Knight and then Jonathan Nolan wrote it with input from Chris. It worked once, let’s hope it works again. If it does, it’ll be the first time any third entry in a superhero franchise has actually lived up to expectations. With the exception of a scant few movies like Toy Story 3 and Back to the Future 3, third movies in any franchise are almost always a disappointment. If anyone can buck the trend, they can.

This also means that the endless string of Batman 3 casting rumors might actually start to make sense now since, you know, they’ve actually started thinking about who might be in it. Somewhere in Jonathan Nolan’s laptop, maybe in a cleverly hidden Word doc, is a name like “Oswald Cobblepot”, “Edward Nygma”, or my personal pick “Basil Karlo”. Stick with us over the next few months to find out which of Batman’s villains have made it into the new script.

Check out the full interview with Nolan, in which he discusses where they’re at with the next Batman, embedded below: