At 165 minutes, The Dark Knight Rises was the longest of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. There’s a rumor from the site Nuke the Fridge that the movie may be getting 30 minutes longer on Blu-Ray. The reintegrated footage would include more of Bane’s backstory as well as added appearances by another character in the film that I won’t name to avoid spoilers. If this is true, this would be the first time that Nolan has done a director’s cut for one of his movies.
/Film’s Germain Lussier is skeptical, however. He writes, “It seems pretty unlikely the crusader for classic shooting on film would release a theatrical product that wasn’t already his ‘director’s cut.'” Lussier says that maybe Nolan trimmed the half hour from the film given the physical size of the print, but he finds that idea unlikely.
Personally I felt The Dark Knight Rises was a flawed but entertaining 165-minute movie that could have been two great 140-minute movies. Stuffing all that material into a single film resulted in a kind of constrained scope. The story for The Dark Knight Rises has a natural break where one movie could have ended on an ominous note (if sufficiently built into). The whole landscape of the film is changed at that point as well, which is a great starting point for a second film. An extra half hour of Bane becoming Bane and other bits wouldn’t improve the overpacked Dark Knight Rises, but it’d be interesting to see the material in some form regardless.
[Nuke the Fridge via /Film]
