Rumor: Dark Knight Rises Blu-ray includes 30 minutes of new footage

Will the home release of The Dark Knight Rises include a bunch of footage cut from the theatrical version? It seems likely.

There’s a new rumor swirling about the Internet that claims the upcoming Blu-ray release of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Rises will include a full half-hour of footage originally cut from the film for its theatrical release. If that seems like the kind of thing Nolan and the suits at Warner Bros. would likely do, that’s because this concept is not all that uncommon. We already told you about the upcoming Blu-ray release of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers which includes a massive amount of superfluous footage, and the idea of an extended “Director’s Cut” of any given movie is nearly as old as theatrical film releases themselves.

What makes this particular rumor so intriguing though, is that despite a lack of official confirmation that this extra footage might find its way onto a Blu-ray disc, the arguments supporting the idea are very convincing. Those of you who read us regularly may recall a piece we published last month which claimed that Bane’s origin story was originally intended to be a significant part of The Dark Knight Rises, but that it was removed during the movie’s editing process. At the time we posited the idea that this extra content might appear on the movie’s inevitable Blu-ray release, both because that sort of thing is increasingly common, and because Nolan’s departure from making superhero movies will likely push Warner Bros. to “market any extraneous scraps from the movie that were left on the cutting room floor.”

Apparently that idea made a lot of sense to the fine people over at Nuke The Fridge. Not only do they make the same claim in an article published earlier today, but they also claim to have corroboration from an unnamed, supposedly reliable insider source. While that alone wouldn’t be enough to convince us of this rumor’s validity, in reporting on NTF’s claims, the likewise fine people at Collider have offered a crucial thought on the topic:

Nolan is the effective spokesperson of IMAX.  One downside to his love of the format is the time limitation, and that 165-minute runtime pushes right up against the limit of what can fit on 70mm IMAX prints.  So there is a plausible reason for this to be the one Nolan film that could not fit every scene he wanted.

If — and we’re still working in the hypothetical here — Nolan had been stymied in his attempts to tell the full story of The Dark Knight Rises by a physical limitation of his beloved IMAX format, it would only make sense to include the full version of the film on Blu-ray. Those discs have massive capacity, and if the excised footage is just lying around, why wouldn’t Nolan (and more importantly Warner Bros.) want to include it on the film’s official home release? That extra content both appeases fans who want to see more of Nolan’s Batman universe and offers a handy bullet point for the PR people who have to sell the Blu-ray to your average consumer.

Again, this is all rumor and speculation, but we’re growing increasingly inclined to believe the whole thing. Please, draw your own conclusions.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

DC Comics releases new mobile apps to expand ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ universe

Better late than never, DC Comics has released two new apps for Nokia Windows Phones that explain what happen prior to the opening of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises.

In what may appear to be a somewhat later than ideal release, DC Comics today announced two new mobile apps that tie in with Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises movie, offering fans a chance to learn just a little bit more about their favorite characters from the final act of the cinematic trilogy.

While one of the two apps repurposes existing material – The Batman Origins app, which DC describes as “featur[ing] the original comic origins for all of the stars from the Dark Knight trilogy and links to the most up-to-date sources about THE DARK KNIGHT RISES film”; instead of the “original” comic origins, what is actually available from the app are origin stories that have been created in the last few years for print in the 52 and Countdown miniseries from the publisher, as well as online use – what may be of more interested to both fans of the movie and more hardcore Batfans in general is the second app, which goes by the functional name ofThe Dark Knight Rises: Prologue.

DC describes that app as offering “an exclusive motion-comic from writer Joshua Williamson and artist Jorge Jimenez that serves as a prologue to THE DARK KNIGHT RISES film,” as well as the pre-requisite “social media share options and links to other apps tied to the film.” This marks not only the first time that DC has created original comic material that ties in with any of the Christopher Nolan series – Comic book versions of the various Tim Burton-era movies exist, and there was a series of print prologues to tie in with last year’s Green Lantern release, but oddly the Dark Knight series has remained unaffiliated with the comic format outside of as source material – but the first time that DC has released individual apps to tie in with multimedia releases.

DC has found success outside of its core comic store audience with digital releases in recent months; its digital comic series Smallville Season 11, which follows the continuity of the decade-long run of the CW series starring Tom Welling, has proven to be a surprisingly strong seller through the publisher’s DC Comics app as well as the multi-publisher ComiXology storefront and app, and titles in its regular DC Universe line have continued to build a fanbase through digital sales without print sales seemingly being affected.

Both the Batman Origins and The Dark Knight Rises: Prologue app are sponsored by Nokia and only available through Nokia Windows Phones; the publisher has not given any information about whether any future releases for other platforms are planned, or if the Joshua Williamson and Jorge Jimenez prologue material will be made available in print at any point.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Bane’s origin was cut from The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises was almost an origin story -- not for Batman, but for antagonist Bane.

Though Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is widely revered as a great movie, there are few that would claim that it lived up to the film’s pre-release hype. Of course, it should be noted that to live up to said hype the movie would have had to cure cancer and rescue dozens of puppies from a burning orphanage, but that’s neither here nor there. Fans collectively seem pretty content with the way Nolan opted to end his Batman trilogy, especially because he’s one of the few filmmakers willing to introduce a major character into a comic book movie without wasting valuable screen time by retelling an origin story that’s available to anyone with an Internet connection or a sizable comic book collection.

Or is he?

According to a recent GQ interview with The Dark Knight Rises’ costume designer Lindy Hemming, it seems that the original plan was to rehash the origin of the film’s main villain, Tom Hardy’s Bane, but that these scenes were cut from the final version of the film. Hemming offers the following description:

There were two things about his clothes. The first thing is that they should be pretty undefined in date and where they came from, other than perhaps north of Asia.

The other thing that you should have seen during that sequence is him being injured in his youth. So one of the fundamental things about his costume is that he has this scar from the back injury. Even if he hasn’t got the bulletproof vest on, he still has to wear the waist belt and the braces. In that scene in the prison, where he’s learning to fight the same way Batman learned to fight, he’s wearing an early version of his waist belt. It’s showing support, but it’s not the finished one he eventually wears. He’s also wearing an early version of his gas mask, all glued together.

If you look at the film, unless they’ve cut it—and I’m sure they haven’t—there’s a whole early section for Tom Hardy where he’s fighting and being taunted by people. He’s got chains on him, and he’s standing on a wooden thing while people are attacking him. And in that scene, he’s wearing a much more ragged, primitive version of the mask.

When it was revealed to Hemming that these scenes were, in fact, excised from the final cut of The Dark Knight Rises, she expressed sadness, before dropping another hint at how Nolan had originally planned to tell the Bane origin tale:

Well that’s an awful shame, but I suppose you have to cut things. I won’t elaborate on it too much, because it isn’t in the film, but there was another section that showed you why he had the mask and where it came from.

As Bleeding Cool points out, with the film’s 3-hour-plus runtime the inclusion of Bane’s origin likely would have made the flick far too long for mortal attention spans. Likewise, the site also notes that anyone with a functional browser already has access to Bane’s origin in full. Wikipedia offers a useful synopsis, though it basically boils down to “Bane was raised in prison, educated in a vast range of subjects, eventually rose to control the various prison gangs around him, then got hooked on a synthetic drug that massively boosted his strength and endurance. Also, this one time, he totally broke Batman’s spine.” Nolan’s vision of Bane seemingly ditches the steroid allegory, though the rest of it seems like a perfectly valid backstory for the character seen in The Dark Knight Rises.

While these origin scenes did not appear in the theatrical version of Nolan’s film, it’s entirely possible that they may show up on the eventual Blu-ray release of the movie as bonus material. Obviously we can’t guarantee anything, but with Nolan moving away from making movies about a crazy vigilante who dresses up like a bat and punches people in the face it makes sense that the movie’s producers would want to market any extraneous scraps from the movie that were left on the cutting room floor.

Sadly, it also makes sense that the aforementioned producers might hold off on releasing this footage alongside the initial home video release. A trilogy box set of Nolan’s Batman movies is almost inevitable, and what better way to promote such a presumably pricey compilation than by telling the world that this collection is the only way to see the deleted scenes we’ve been discussing?

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com