I hope Nolan pulls it off, series with more than one sequel (trilogy or not) can rarely sustain a high quality for three movies.
Will be interesting to see if the weak point in the trilogy is the first film, which is usually the strongest in a trilogy.
Often, I find that if the second movie is the best of a trilogy, then the third one is the worst, and the first is in the middle, Like the
Godfather trilogy or the first three
Alien movies (
Alien 3 was apparently so bad to some, that it was the reason they went ahead and made
Alien Resurrection, and though
Alien 3 is a guilty pleasure for me, I think it's still the weakest of the first three). The Sam Raimi
Spider-Man trilogy also fell in this category --
Spider-Man 2 was a masterpiece, and the high expectations led
Spider-Man 3 to be a letdown.
The other category is when the first movie is the strongest, and the second movie is the weakest, third is in the middle. The
Men in Black movies are probably the best recent examples, but also consider the
Indiana Jones trilogy, in which
Raiders was the best and
Temple of Doom was the weakest. (I don't count
KotKS for these purposes, but personally, I found it to be every bit as good as
Raiders and
Last Crusade.)
And I'm pretty sure this all has to do with expectations. I'll use
Spider-Man as an example -- the first one was good, the second one was great, but after how great the second one was, the third was a bit of a letdown that would've otherwise been decent when put up against the first movie, albeit weaker because of its bloated story and excessive melodrama, not to mention the multiple villain syndrome, which tends to be what causes superhero movies to fall apart.
And then there's the
Men in Black trilogy, where the first movie was excellent and the second was very weak, especially by comparison. By the third film, expectations are much lower after the first sequel, so that it ends up being much better than the second but not quite as good as the first.
But I've actually rarely seen a movie trilogy in which the movies get progressively worse.
And in the case of the Nolan
Batman movies, so far,
TDKR is the weakest, but some have said that it has more in common with
Batman Begins than
The Dark Knight. For most people,
The Dark Knight is the best, so they're likely to be disappointed by the third film. For me, I personally loved
Batman Begins but didn't much care for
The Dark Knight (it was okay, but not great), so maybe
The Dark Knight Rises will be a step up. And it likely will be for the Pittsburgh Steelers stadium imploding alone.