I don't really get holding the Dark Knight up as some kind of untouchable standard that hasn't been matched. It's good, but it's not like it was some masterpiece. I suspect it has more to do with it coming out and being part of the zeitgeist when you were 19 (if you're 34 now) than some kind of objective greatness. Just like a 50 year old might think that a movie like Pulp Fiction hasn't been matched since.
Anyway, the analog vs. digital medium issue is relevant in a lot of disciplines, but it absolutely isn't with movies. The cost of film in any decent sized production was basically a rounding error. I think 35mm cost about $75/minute in today's dollars. So with a normal 1:20 shooting ratio, film would cost about $175K for an average big budget movie. So if directors were ever avoiding extra takes or whatnot due to cost, it was because of crew and talent costs, not because they wanted to save a few thousand dollars in film.
Obviously there are other differences, but most of the limitations of film were basically non-issues for larger productions (i.e. they used video taps to get a live feed of what the film camera was seeing, they had enough crew to make film changeovers as fast as possible, etc.). And it's not like storing 8K video and having enough redundancy is without its own costs and workflow.
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