Who better to oversee the reboot of the Superman franchise, but the guy who successfully rebooted the Batman franchise, and turned its second installment into one of the most popular super hero movies of all time? Luckily, it seems that Warner Bros. is thinking exactly that. Deadline Hollywood is reporting that while Christopher Nolan probably won’t be directing a Superman reboot, the studio has asked him to “mentor” the re-launch of the last son of krypton to the big screen.

Right now, Nolan is finishing up Inception while his brother Jonathan ‘Jonah’ Nolan and David S. Goyer are starting to pen the next adventure of The Dark Knight. Deadline states that Superman 3.0 is in the earliest stage of development, and Nolan and Goyer have just “cracked” the idea for the Batman 3 script. That said, both projects are still quite a way off from your local cineplex.

While it’s not entirely clear what role Nolan will play in the relaunch of Superman, some are speculating that he may simply steer the direction of the franchise so that it may one day, seamlessly cross paths with Nolan’s own Batman franchise in a possible lead up to a Justice League film. This would essentially place Nolan in a similar position to Jon Favreau with his Iron Man/Avengers role in the Marvel film world.

All of this Superman talk is somewhat surprising, given that DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson said just last September that,

“We actually don’t have any current plans for Superman.”

As we told you back in August, Warner Bros. lost the rights to the Superman’s origin story during a legal dispute with the estate of creator, Jerry Siegel. The ruling stated that Warner Bros must start production on a new Supes project by 2011, or those rights would revert to the Siegel and Shuster estates, and in 2013 – the entire copyright for the character returns to Siegel and Shuster, leaving them free to license Superman anyone.

[Source] Deadline